>>mhm. >>Good morning. Live from Las Vegas. That snowflake Summit 22. Lisa Martin With Day Volonte David's Great. We have three wall to wall days of coverage at Snowflake Summit 22 this year. >>Yeah, it's all about data and bringing data to applications. And we've got some big announcements coming this week. Super exciting >>collaboration around data. We are excited to welcome our first two guests before the keynote. We have seen Nielsen in S V. P of data and Analytics Service offering head at emphasis. And Chris Dignan alumni is back with us to chief revenue officer at stuff like guys. Great to have you on the programme. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. So he'll tell us what's going on with emphasis and snowflake and the partnership. Give us all that good stuff. >>Yeah, No, I think with the convergence of, uh, data digital and computing economy, um, you know that convergence is creating so much possibilities for for customers, uh, snowflake and emphases working together to help our customers realise the vision and these possibilities that are getting driven. We share a very strategic partnership where we are thinking ahead for our customers in terms of what, uh, we can do together in order to build solutions in order to bring out the expertise that is needed for such transformations and also influencing the thinking, Um, and the and the point of view in the market together so that, you know there is there is cohesive approach to doing this transformation and getting to those business outcomes. So it's a It's a partnership that's very successful and its strategic for for our customers, and we continue to invest for the market. >>Got some great customer. Some of my favourite CVS, Nike, William Sanoma. Gotta love that one. Chris talked to us about the snowflake data cloud. What makes it so unique and compelling in the market? >>Well, I think our customers, really they are going through digital transformation today, and they're moving from on premise to the cloud and historically speaking, there just hasn't been the right tool set to help them do that. I think snowflake brings to the table an opportunity for them to take all of their data and take it and and allow it to go from one cloud to the other so they can sit on a W s it can sit on Azure can sit on G, C, P and I can move around from cloud to cloud, and they can do analytics on top of that. >>So data has been traditionally really hard. And we saw that in the big data movement. But we learned a lot. Uh, and AI has been, you know, challenging. So what are you seeing with with customers? What are they struggling with? And how are you guys helping them? >>Yeah. So if you look at the customer journey, they have invested in a number of technologies in the past and are now at a juncture where they need to transform that landscape. They have the challenges of legacy debt that they need to, you know, get rid of or transform. They have the challenges of really bringing, you know, a cohesive understanding within the enterprise as to what these possibilities are for their business. Given the strategy that they are pursuing, um, business and I t cycles are not necessarily aligned. Um, you have the challenge of very fragmented data landscape that they have created over a period of time. How do you, you know, put all these together and work with a specific outcome in mind so that you're not doing transformation for the purpose of transformation. But to be able to actually drive new business models, new data driven products and services ability for you to collaborate with your partners and create unique competitive advantage in the market. And how do you bring those purposes together with the transformation that that's really happening? And and that's where you know our our customers, um, you know, grapple with the challenges of bringing it together. So, >>Chris, how do you see? Because it was talking about, uh, legacy that I think technical debt. Um, you kind of started out making the data warehouse easier. Then this data cloud thing comes out. You're like, Oh, that's an interesting vision and all of a sudden it's way more than vision. You get this huge ecosystem you're extending, we're gonna hear the announcements this morning. We won't. We won't spill the beans, but but really expanding the data cloud. So it's hard to keep up with with where you're at. So I think modernisation, right? So how do you think about modernisation? How are your customers thinking about it? And what's the scope of Snowflake. >>Well, you know, I think historically, you asked about AI and Ml and, you know, in the A I world historically, they've lacked data, and I think because we're the data cloud, we're bringing data, you know, and making it available and democratising it for everybody. And then, you know, partners like emphasis are actually helping us bring, you know, applications and new business models to to the table to our customers and their innovating on top of the data that we already have in the Snowflake Data Club. >>Chris, can you talk about some of the verticals where you guys are successful with emphasis that the three that I mentioned are retailers, But I know that finance, healthcare and life sciences are are huge for smooth, like talk to me, give us a perspective of the verticals that are coming to you. Guys saying help us out with transport. >>You know, I'll give you just an example. So So in the in the retail space, for example, Kraft Heinz is a is a joint customer of ours. And, you know, they've been all in on on snowflakes, Data Cloud and one of our big customers as well it is is Albertsons, and Albertans realises, Oh my gosh, I have all this information around the consumer in in the grocery stores and Kraft Heinz. They want access to that, and they actually can make supply chain decisions a lot faster if they have access to it. So with snowflakes data sharing, we can actually allow them to share data. Albertans share data directly with Kraft, Heinz and Kraft. Heinz can actually make supply chain decisions in real time so that these are some of the stuff that emphasis and stuff like help our customers self. >>So traditionally, the data pipeline goes through some very highly specialised individuals, whether the data engineer, the data scientists and data analyst. So that example that you just gave our organisation you mentioned before democratisation. So democratisation needs to be as a businessperson, I actually can get access to the data. So in that example that you gave between Kraft, Heinz and and and Albertson, is it the the highly hyper specialised teams sharing that data? Or is it actually extending into the line of business focus? >>That's so that's the interesting part for us is I think, snowflake, we just recently reorganise my sales team this year into verticals, and the reason we did that is customers no longer want to talk to us about speeds and feeds of how fast my database goes. They want to actually talk about business outcomes. How do I solve for demand forecasting? How do I supply fix my supply chain issues? Those are things. Those are the. That's how we're aligning with emphasis. So well is they've been doing this for a long time, Can only we haven't. And so we need their help on getting us to the next level of of the sales motion and talking to our customers on solving these business challenges in >>terms of that next level. So no question for you. Where are the customer conversations happening? At what level? I mean, we've seen such dramatic changes in the market in the last couple of years. Now we're dealing with inflation rising interest rates. Ukraine. Are you seeing the conversations in terms of building data platforms rising up the C suite? As every company recognises, we're going to be a data company. We're not gonna be a business. >>Absolutely. And I think all the macroeconomic forces that you talked about that's working on the enterprises globally is actually leading them to think about how to future proof their business models. Right? And there are tonnes of learning that they've hired in the last two or three years and digitising in embracing more digital models. The conversation with the customers have really pivoted towards business outcome. It is a C suite conversation. It is no longer just an incremental change for the for the companies they recognise. That data has been touted as a strategic asset for a long time, but I think it's taking a purpose and a meaning as to what it does for for the customers, the conversations are around industry verticals. You know, what are the specific challenges and opportunities that the the enterprises have, uh, and how you realise those and these cuts across multiple different layers. You know, we're talking about how your democratised data, which in our point of view, is absolute, must in terms of putting a foundation that doesn't take super specialised people to be able to run every operation and every bit of data that you process we have invested in building autonomous data and a state that can process data as it comes in without any manual intervention and take it all the way to consumption but also investing in those industry solutions. Along with snowflake, we launched the healthcare and life Sciences solution. We launched the only channel for retail and CPG. And these are great examples of how Snowflake Foundation enables democratisation on one side but also help solve business problems. In fact, with Snowflake, we have a very, uh, special partnership because our point of view on data economy is about how you connect with the network partners externally, and snowflake brings native capabilities. On this, we leverage that to Dr Exchanges for our customers and one of the services company in the recycling business. Uh, we're actually building and in exchange, which will allow the data points from multiple different sources and partners to come together. So they have a better understanding of their customers, their operations, the field operations and things >>like building a data ecosystem. Yes. Alright, They they Is it a two sided market place where you guys are observers and providing the the technology and the process, you know, guidance. What's your role in that? >>Yeah. So, um, we were seeing their revolution coming? Uh, two stages. Maybe even more. Um, customers are comfortable building an ecosystem. That's kind of private for them. Which means that they know who they are sharing data with. They know what the data is getting used for. And how do you really put governance on this? So that on one side you can trust it on the other side. There is a good use of that data, Uh, and not, uh, you know, compromise on their quality or privacy and some of the other regulations. But we do see this opening up to the two sided market places as well. Uh, some of the industry's lend themselves extremely well for that kind of play. We have seen that happening in trading area. We've seen that happen. And, uh, you know, the credit checks and things like that which are usually open for, you know, those kind of ecosystem. But the conversations and the and the programmes are really leading towards towards that in the market. >>You know, Lisa, one of things I wrote about this weekend is I was decided to come to stuff like summit and and see one of the, you know, thesis I have is that we're going to move not just beyond analytics, including analytics, but also building data products that can be monetised and and I'm hoping we're going to see some of that here. Are you seeing that Christian in the customer? It's It's >>a great question, David. So So we have You know, I just thought of it as as he was talking about. We have a customer who's a very large customer of ours who's in the financial services space, and they handle roughly 40% of the credit card transactions that happen in the US and they're coming to us and saying they want to go from zero in data business today to a $2 billion business over the next five years, and they're leaning on us to help them do that. And one of the things that's exciting for me is they're coming to us not saying Hey, how do you do it? You know, they're saying, Hey, we want to build a consumption model on top of snowflake and we want to use you as the delivery mechanism and the billing mechanism to help us actually monetise that data. So yes, the answer is. You know, I I used to sell to, you know, chief Data Officers and and see IOS. Now I'm talking to VPs of sales and I'm talking to chief operating officers and I'm talking to CEOs about how do we actually create a new revenue stream? And that's just I mean, it's exhilarating to have those conversations. That's >>data products. They don't have to worry about the infrastructure that comes from the cloud. They don't have to worry about the governance, as Senior was saying, Just put >>it in stuff like Just >>put stuff like that. So I call it The super cloud is kind of a, you know, a funny little tongue in cheek. But it's happening. It's this layer. It's not just multiple clouds. You see a lot of your critical competitors adjacent competitors saying, Hey, we're now running in in Google or we're running in Azure. We've been running on AWS. This is different. This is different, isn't it? It's a cloud that floats above the The infrastructure of the hyper scale is, and that's that's a new era. I think >>it's a new error. I think they're you know, I think the hyper scholars want to, you know, keep us as a as a data warehouse and and we're not. The customers are not letting them so So I think that's you know where emphasis kind of saw the light early on. And they were our innovation partner of the year, uh, this past year and they're helping us in our customers innovate, >>but you're uniquely qualified to do that where? I don't think it's the hyper scholars agenda. At least I never say never with the hyper scale is, but yeah, they have focused on providing infrastructure. And, yeah, they have databases and other tools. But that that cross cloud that continuum to your point, talking to VPs of sales and how do you generate revenue? That maybe, is a conversation that they have, but not explicitly as to how to actually do it in a data >>cloud. That's right. I mean, those and those are the Those are the fun conversations because you're you're saying, Hey, we can actually create a new revenue stream. And how can we actually help you solve our joint customers problems? So, yes, it is. Well, >>that's competitive differentiation for businesses. I mean, this is, as I mentioned Every company has to be a data company. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around much longer. They've got to be able to to leverage a data platform like snowflake, to find insights, be able to act on them and create value new services, new products to stay competitive, to stay ahead of the competition. That's no longer nice to have >>100%. I mean, I think they're they're all scared. I mean, you know, like if you look in the financial services space, they look at some of the fintech, as you know, the giant £800 gorillas look at the small fintech has huge threats to the business, and they're coming to us and say, How can we innovate our business now? And they're looking at us as the the innovator, and they're looking at emphasis to help them do that. So I think these are These are incredible times. >>So the narrative on Wall Street, of course, this past earnings season was consumption and who has best visibility and and they they were able to snowflake had a couple of large customers dial down consumption, some consumer facing. Here's the thing. If you're selling a data product for more than it costs you to make. If you dial down consumption in the future, you're gonna dial down revenue. So that's it's going to become less and less discretionary over time. And that, to me, is the next error. That's really exciting. >>The key, The key there is understanding the unit of measure. I think that's the number. One question that we get from customers is what is the unit of measure that we care about, that we want to monetise because to your point, it costs you more to make the product. You're not going to sell it right? And so I think that those are the things that the energy that we're spending with customers today is advising them, jointly advising them on how to actually monetise the specific, you know, unit of measure that they care >>about because when they get the Amazon bill or the snowflake bill, the CFO starts knocking the door. The answer has to be well, look at all the revenue that we generated and all the operating profit and the free cash flow that we drove, and then it's like, Oh, I get it. Keep doing it well, if I'm >>if I'm going on sales calls with the VP of sales and his their sales team, fantastic, right generated helping them generate revenue, right? That's a great conversation >>dynamic. And I think the adoption is really driven through the value, uh, that they can drive in their ecosystem. Their products are similar to products and services that these companies sell. And if you're embedding data inside Syria into your products services, that makes you that much more competitive in the market and drive value for your stakeholders. And that's essentially the future business model that we're talking about. On one side, the other one is the agility. Things aren't remaining constant, they are constantly changing, and we talked about some of those forces earlier. All of this is changing. The landscape is changing the the needs in the economy and things like that, and how you adapt to those kind of models in the future and pivoted on data capabilities that lets you identify new opportunities and and create new value. >>Speaking of creating new value last question guys, before we wrap, what's the go to market approach here between the two companies working customers go to get engaged. I imagine both sides. >>Yeah. I mean, the way that partnership looks good to me is is sell with co selling. So So I think, you know, we look at developing joint solutions with emphasis. They've done a wonderful job of leading into our partnership. So, you know, Sue Neill and I have a regular cadence where we talked every quarter, and our sales teams and our partner teams are are all leaning in and co selling. I don't know if you >>have Absolutely, um, you know, we we proactively identify, you know, the opportunities for our customers. And we work together at all levels within, you know, between the two companies to be able to bring a cohesive solution and a proposition for the customers. Really help them understand how to, you know, what is it that they can, um, get to and how you get that journey actually executed. And it's a partnership that works very seamlessly through that entire process, not just upstream when we're selling, but also downstream and we're executing. And we've had tremendous success together and look forward to more. >>Congratulations on that success, guys. Thank you so much for coming on talking about new possibilities with data and AI and sharing some of the impact that the technologies are making. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Thank you So much >>for our guests and a Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live in Las Vegas from Snowflake Summit 22 back after the keynote with more breaking news. Mhm, mhm.

>>Welcome back to HPD discovered 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover we're going to dig into the most pressing topic not only for I. T. But entire organizations and that's cyber security with me. Miss O'Neil James, senior Director of security engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So Neil welcome to the cube. Come on in. >>Dave, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>Hey, you talked about Project Aurora today. Tell us about project Aurora. What is that? >>So I'm glad you asked. Project Aurora is a new framework that we're working on that attempts to provide the underpinnings for Zero Trust architectures inside of everything that we build at. Hp. Zero Trust is a way of providing a mechanism for enterprises to allow for everything in their enterprise. Whether it's a server, a human or anything in between to be verified and attested to before they're allowed to access or transact in certain ways. That's what we announced today. >>Well, so in response to a spate of damaging cyber attacks last month, President biden issued an executive order designed to improve the United States security posture and in that order essentially issued a zero trust mandate. You know, it's interesting. Zero Trust has gone from a buzzword to a critical part of a security strategy. So in thinking about a zero trust architecture, how do you think about that and how does project Aurora fit in? >>Yeah, Zero Trust architecture as a concept has has been around for quite some time now and over the last few years you've seen many a company attempting to provide technologies that they purport to be. Zero trust. Zero Trust is a framework. It's not one technology, it's not one tool, it's not one product. It is an entire framework of thinking and applying cyber security principles uh to everything that we just talked about beforehand. Project Aurora, as I said before hand, is designed to provide a way for our ourselves and our customers to be able to measure a test and verify every single piece of technology that we sell to them, whether it's a server or everything else in between. Now, we've got a long way to go before we're able to cover everything that HP sells. But for us these capabilities are the root of Zero Trust architectures, you need to be able to at any given moments notice, verify measure and a test and this is what we're doing with Project Aurora. >>So you founded a company called citadel and sold out to HPD last year. And my understanding is you were really the driving force behind the secure production identity framework, but you said zero Trust is really a framework, uh that's an open source project. Maybe you can explain what that is. I mean people talk about the nist framework for cybersecurity. How does that relate? What why is this important and how does Aurora fit into it? >>Yeah, so it's a good question. The next framework is a broader framework for cybersecurity that couples and covers many aspects of thinking about the security posture of an enterprise, whether it's network security, host based intrusion detection capabilities in response things of that sort Spiffy. What you're referring to secure production identity framework for everyone is an open source framework and technology base that we did work on when I was the ceo of Seattle. That was designed to provide a platform agnostic way to assign identity to anything that runs in a network. And so think about yourself or myself, we are uh, we have identities in our back pocket driver's license, passports, things of that sort. They provide a unique assertion of who we are and what we're allowed to do that does not exist in the world of software. And what spiffy does is it provides that mechanism so that you can actually use frameworks like project Aurora that can verify the underpinning infrastructure on top of which software workloads run to be able to verify the spiffy identities even better than before >>is the intensive product ties this capability within this framework. How do you approach this from HP standpoint >>suspicion inspire will and always will be. As far as I'm concerned, remain an open source project held by the cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's for the world. And we want that to be the case because we think that more of our enterprise customers are not living in the world of one vendor or two vendors. They have multiple vendors. And so we need to give them the tools and the flexibility to be able to allow for open source capabilities like Spiffy inspire to provide a way for them to assign these identities and assign policies and control regardless of the infrastructure choices they make today or tomorrow. H P E recognizes that this is a key differentiating capability for our customers. And our goal is to be able to look at our offerings that power the next generation of workloads, kubernetes instances, containers, serverless and anything that comes after that. And our responsibility to say, how can we actually take what we have and be able to provide those kinds of assertions, those underpinnings for zero trust that are going to be necessary to distribute those identities to others workloads and to do so in a scalable, effective and automated manner, which is one of the most important things that project Wara does. >>So a lot of companies senior will set up a security division, uh and and so, but is the IS HPV strategy to essentially uh embed security across its entire portfolio? How do you, how should we think about HP strategy in cyber? >>Yeah, so it's a it's a great question. Hp has a long history, uh security and other domains, networking and servers and storage and beyond. Uh the way we think about what we're building with project or this is plumbing, this is plumbing that must be and everything we built, customers don't buy one product from us and they think it's one custom, one company and something else from us and they think it's another company, they're buying HPV products. And our goal with Project Aurora is to ensure that this plumbing is widely and uniformly distributed and made available. So whether you're buying in Aruba device, a primary storage device or per alliance server. Project Aurora's capabilities are going to provide a consistent way to do the things that I've mentioned beforehand To allow for those zero trust architectures to become real. >>So it's I alluded to President biden's executive order previously, I mean you're a security practitioner or an expert in this area. It just seems as though, and I'd love to get your comments on this. I mean the adversaries are well funded. You know, they're either organized crime, their nation states, uh they're they're extracting a lot of very valuable information, they're monetizing that you've seen things like ransomware as a service now, so any any knucklehead can, can be in the ransomware business. Um it's just this endless escalation game. Um how do you see the industry approaching this? What needs to happen? So obviously I like what you're saying about the plumbing, you're not trying to attack this with a bunch of point tools, which is part of the problem. How do you see the industry coming together to solve this problem? >>Yeah, it's uh if you operate in the world of security, you have to operate from the standpoint of humility. And the reason why you have to operate from a standpoint of humility is because the attack landscape is constantly changing the things and tools and investments and techniques that you thought were going to thwart an attacker. Today, there quickly outdated within a week, a month, a quarter or whatever it might be. And so you have to be able to consistently and continuously evolve and adapt towards what customers are facing on any given moments notice I think to be able to as an industry tackle these issues more and more. So you need to be able to have all of us start to abide, not abide, but start to adopt these open source patterns. We recognize that every company hB included is here to serve customers and to make money for its shareholders as well. But in order for us to do that, we have to also recognize that they've got other technologies in their infrastructure as well. And so it's our belief, it's my belief that allowing for us to support open standards with spiffy inspire and perhaps with some of the aspects of what we're doing with project Aurora, I think allows for other people to be able to kind of deliver the same underpinning capabilities, the plumbing if you will, regardless of whether it's an HP product or somebody else along those lines as well. We need more of that generally across our industry and I think we're far from it. >>I mean this sounds like a war. I mean, it's it's more than a battle. It's a war that actually is never gonna end. Uh, and I don't think there is an end in sight. And you hear, see, so let's talk about the shortage of talent. Uh, they're getting inundated with point products and tools and then that just creates more technical debt. It's been interesting to watch interesting. Maybe it's not the right word, but the pivot 20 trust, endpoint security, cloud security and the exposure that we've now seen as a result of the pandemic was sort of rushed. And then of course, we've seen, you know, the the adversaries really take advantage of that. So, I mean, what you're describing is this ongoing, never ending battle, >>isn't it? Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's it's going to be ongoing. And by the way, Zero Trust is not the end state, right. I mean, there was things that we called the final nail in the coffin Five years ago, 10 years ago and yet the Attackers persevered. And that's because there's a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of uh, infrastructure moving to dynamic architecture is like cloud and others that are going to be poorly configured and are going to not have necessarily the best and brightest providing security around that. So we have to remain vigilant. We have to work as hard as we can to help customers deploy Zero Trust architecture, but we have to be thinking about what's next. We have to be watching, studying and evolving to be able to prepare ourselves to be able to go after whatever the next capabilities are. >>What I like about what you're saying is, you're right. You have to have humility. I don't want to say. I mean it's it's hard because I do feel like a lot of times the vendor community says, okay, we have the answer to your point. You know, okay. We have a zero trust solution or we have a security solution and there is no silver bullet in this game. And I think what I'm hearing from you is look, we're providing infrastructure, Plumbing is the substrate, but it's an open system. It's got to evolve. We've anything you didn't say, but I love your thoughts on this is we got to collaborate with who some of you might think is your competitor because they're still, they're the good guys. >>Yeah. I mean our our customers are customers don't care that we're competitors with anybody. They care that we're helping them solve their problems for their business. So our responsibility is to figure out what we need to do to work together to provide the basic capabilities that allow for our customers to to remain in business. Right. If cybersecurity issues plague any of our customers, that doesn't affect just HP. That affects all of the companies that are serving that customer itself. So I think we have a shared responsibility to be able to protect our customers >>and you've been in cyber for much, if not most of your career. Right, correct. Let's go. So I got to ask you, did you have a superhero when you were a kid? Did you have sort of uh, you know, save the world thing going? >>Did I have to say, you know, I I didn't have to save the world thing going. But I had um I had, I had two parents that cared for for the world in many, many ways. They were both in the world of health care and so every day I saw them taking care of other people. And I think that probably rubbed off in some of the decisions that I made too >>Well. It's awesome. You can do a great work, really appreciate you coming on the cube and and thank you so much for your insights. >>I appreciate that. Thanks >>All right. Thank you for being with us for our ongoing coverage. HPD discovered 21. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube. The leader in digital tech coverage will be right back. Mhm.

(bright music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of Discover. We're going to dig into the most pressing topic, not only for IT, but entire organizations. And that's cyber security. With me is Sunil James, senior director of security engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Sunil, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Dave, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> Hey, you talked about project Aurora today. Tell us about project Aurora, what is that? >> So I'm glad you asked. Project Aurora is a new framework that we're working on that attempts to provide the underpinnings for Zero Trust architectures inside of everything that we build at HPE. Zero Trust is a way of providing a mechanism for enterprises to allow for everything in their enterprise, whether it's a server, a human, or anything in between, to be verified and attested to before they're allowed to access or transact in certain ways. That's what we announced today. >> Well, so in response to a spate of damaging cyber attacks last month, President Biden issued an executive order designed to improve the United States' security posture. And in that order, he essentially issued a Zero Trust mandate. You know, it's interesting, Sunil. Zero Trust has gone from a buzzword to a critical part of a security strategy. So in thinking about a Zero Trust architecture, how do you think about that, and how does project Aurora fit in? >> Yeah, so Zero Trust architecture, as a concept, has been around for quite some time now. And over the last few years, we've seen many a company attempting to provide technologies that they purport to be Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a framework. It's not one technology, it's not one tool, it's not one product. It is an entire framework of thinking and applying cybersecurity principles to everything that we just talked about beforehand. Project Aurora, as I said beforehand, is designed to provide a way for ourselves and our customers to be able to measure, attest, and verify every single piece of technology that we sell to them. Whether it's a server or everything else in between. Now, we've got a long way to go before we're able to cover everything that HPE sells. But for us, these capabilities are the root of Zero Trust architectures. You need to be able to, at any given moment's notice, verify, measure, and attest, and this is what we're doing with project Aurora. >> So you founded a company called Scytale and sold that to HPE last year. And my understanding is you were really the driving force behind the secure production identity framework, but you said Zero Trust is really a framework. That's an open source project. Maybe you can explain what that is. I mean, people talk about the NIST Framework for cybersecurity. How does that relate? Why is this important and how does Aurora fit into it? >> Yeah, so that's a good question. The NIST Framework is a broader framework for cybersecurity that couples and covers many aspects of thinking about the security posture of an enterprise, whether it's network security, host based intrusion detection capabilities, incident response, things of that sort. SPIFFE, which you're referring to, Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone, is an open source framework and technology base that we did work on when I was the CEO of Scytale, that was designed to provide a platform agnostic way to assign identity to anything that runs in a network. And so think about yourself or myself. We have identities in our back pocket, driver's license, passports, things of that sort. They provide a unique assertion of who we are, and what we're allowed to do. That does not exist in the world of software. And what SPIFFE does is it provides that mechanism so that you can actually use frameworks like project Aurora that can verify the underpinning infrastructure on top of which software workloads run to be able to verify those SPIFFE identities even better than before. >> Is the intent to productize this capability, you know, within this framework? How do you approach this from HPE's standpoint? >> So SPIFFE and SPIRE will and always will be, as far as I'm concerned, remain an open source project held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's for the world, all right. And we want that to be the case because we think that more of our Enterprise customers are not living in the world of one vendor or two vendors. They have multiple vendors. And so we need to give them the tools and the flexibility to be able to allow for open source capabilities like SPIFFE and SPIRE to provide a way for them to assign these identities and assign policies and control, regardless of the infrastructure choices they make today or tomorrow. HPE recognizes that this is a key differentiating capability for our customers. And our goal is to be able to look at our offerings that power the next generation of workloads. Kubernetes instances, containers, serverless, and anything that comes after that. And our responsibility is to say, "How can we actually take what we have and be able to provide those kinds of assertions, those underpinnings for Zero Trust that are going to be necessary to distribute those identities to those workloads, and to do so in a scalable, effective, and automated manner?" Which is one of the most important things that project Aurora does. >> So a lot of companies, Sunil, will set up a security division. But is the HPE strategy to essentially embed security across its entire portfolio? How should we think about HPE strategy in cyber? >> Yeah, so it's a great question. HPE has a long history in security and other domains, networking, and servers, and storage, and beyond. The way we think about what we're building with project Aurora, this is plumbing. This is plumbing that must be in everything we build. Customers don't buy one product from us and they think it's one company, and something else from us, and they think it's another company. They're buying HPE products. And our goal with project Aurora is to ensure that this plumbing is widely and uniformly distributed and made available. So whether you're buying an Aruba device, a Primera storage device, or a ProLiant server, project Aurora's capabilities are going to provide a consistent way to do the things that I've mentioned beforehand to allow for those Zero Trust architectures to become real. >> So, as I alluded to President Biden's executive order previously. I mean, you're a security practitioner, you're an expert in this area. It just seems as though, and I'd love to get your comments on this. I mean, the adversaries are well-funded, you know, they're either organized crime, they're nation states. They're extracting a lot of very valuable information, they're monetizing that. You've seen things like ransomware as a service now. So any knucklehead can be in the ransomware business. So it's just this endless escalation game. How do you see the industry approaching this? What needs to happen? So obviously I like what you're saying about the plumbing. You're not trying to attack this with a bunch of point tools, which is part of the problem. How do you see the industry coming together to solve this problem? >> Yeah. If you operate in the world of security, you have to operate from the standpoint of humility. And the reason why you have to operate from a standpoint of humility is because the attack landscape is constantly changing. The things, and tools, and investments, and techniques that you thought were going to thwart an attacker today, they're quickly outdated within a week, a month, a quarter, whatever it might be. And so you have to be able to consistently and continuously evolve and adapt towards what customers are facing on any given moment's notice. I think to be able to, as an industry, tackle these issues more and moreso, you need to be able to have all of us start to abide, not abide, but start to adopt these open-source patterns. We recognize that every company, HPE included, is here to serve customers and to make money for its shareholders as well. But in order for us to do that, we have to also recognize that they've got other technologies in their infrastructure as well. And so it's our belief, it's my belief, that allowing for us to support open standards with SPIFFE and SPIRE, and perhaps with some of the aspects of what we're doing with project Aurora, I think allows for other people to be able to kind of deliver the same underpinning capabilities, the plumbing, if you will, regardless of whether it's an HPE product or something else along those lines as well. We need more of that generally across our industry, and I think we're far from it. >> I mean, this sounds like a war. I mean, it's more than a battle, it's a war that actually is never going to end. And I don't think there is an end in sight. And you hear CESOs talk about the shortage of talent, they're getting inundated with point products and tools, and then that just creates more technical debt. It's been interesting to watch. Interesting maybe is not the right word. But the pivot to Zero Trust, endpoint security, cloud security, and the exposure that we've now seen as a result of the pandemic was sort of rushed. And then of course, we've seen, you know, the adversaries really take advantage of that. So, I mean what you're describing is this ongoing never-ending battle, isn't it? >> Yeah, yeah, no, it's going to be ongoing. And by the way, Zero Trust is not the end state, right? I mean, there was things that we called the final nail in the coffin five years ago, 10 years ago, and yet the attackers persevered. And that's because there's a lot of innovation out there. There's a lot of infrastructure moving to dynamic architectures like cloud and others that are going to be poorly configured, and are going to not have necessarily the best and brightest providing security around them. So we have to remain vigilant. We have to work as hard as we can to help customers deploy Zero Trust architectures. But we have to be thinking about what's next. We have to be watching, studying, and evolving to be able to prepare ourselves, to be able to go after whatever the next capabilities are. >> What I like about what you're saying is, you're right. You have to have humility. I don't want to say, I mean, it's hard because I do feel like a lot of times the vendor community says, "Okay, we have the answer," to your point. "Okay, we have a Zero Trust solution." Or, "We have a solution." And there is no silver bullet in this game. And I think what I'm hearing from you is, look we're providing infrastructure, plumbing, the substrate, but it's an open system. It's got to evolve. And the thing you didn't say, but I'd love your thoughts on this is we've got to collaborate with somebody you might think is your competitor. 'Cause they're the good guys. >> Yeah. Our customers don't care that we're competitors with anybody. They care that we're helping them solve their problems for their business. So our responsibility is to figure out what we need to do to work together to provide the basic capabilities that allow for our customers to remain in business, right? If cybersecurity issues plague any of our customers that doesn't affect just HPE, that affects all of the companies that are serving that customer. And so, I think we have a shared responsibility to be able to protect our customers. >> And you've been in cyber for much, if not most of your career, right? >> Correct. >> So I got to ask you, did you have a superhero when you were a kid? Did you have a sort of a, you know, save the world thing going? >> Did I have a, you know, I didn't have a save the world thing going, but I had, I had two parents that cared for the world in many, many ways. They were both in the world of healthcare. And so everyday I saw them taking care of other people. And I think that probably rubbed off in some of the decisions that I make too. >> Well it's awesome. You're doing great work, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and thank you so much for your insights. >> I appreciate that, thanks. >> And thank you for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The leader in digital tech coverage. We'll be right back. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Instructor: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering Google Cloud Next OnAir 20. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage, virtual coverage of Google Next OnAir. I'm John for host theCUBE, We're here in Palo Alto California, for our remote interviews, part of our quarantine crew, getting all the stories that matter, Google Next OnAir, continuous event through the summer. We're calling it the summer of cloud. We've got two great guests here. Sunil Potti general manager and vice president of cloud security at Google Cloud. and Orion Hindawi co founder and CEO of Tanium. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on today, appreciate it. Great event you guys have on the continue. I'll call it the summer cloud. It's a lot of events that Google's having, So you guys and your team are doing a great job, but there's some hard news. You guys are announcing an expanded partnership together. Sunil tell us what is the news today. >> John, first of all, great to see you again, love being on theCUBE any time, and it's my honor to actually share the stage this time around with Orion and the Tanium team. So essentially what we're announcing today, is the fact that, as most of you know, especially in the new normal with a distributed workforce, and potentially it being the safer normal, down the road it presents, an unprecedented opportunity, I think in our opinion, that we can use this to accelerate potentially safer posture that otherwise would have taken years to build into the enterprise ecosystem that we could now bring forward, in a potentially, you know, in the year 2020 or 2021. So the primary announcement, is based on the fact that, Tanium's, you know, core enterprise offering and Google clouds, chronicle offering are coming together, to build a full stack offering for endpoint detection and response so that customers can have an end to end offering. That's both powerful, and you know, easy to use. All the way from the detection, response, remediation and analytics, all built together into one seamless, easy to consume offering for the global enterprise and being delivered in such a way that it can take into account organizations of thousands of employees or hundreds of thousands of employees. All by the same cloud native solution. >> All right how about why you're excited about this deal. What's different about it. Obviously there's a relationship here, what's so exciting about this story. >> Yeah, I think, you know, Orion to comment as well, but look, I think the key thing that we sort of partnered on initially was a customer driven, you know, technology centric integrations, where, you know, we went deep from a chronical perspective, to ensure native integration, between Tanium products to send signals, out of the box, as well as curated, enhanced, enriched, so that they could be actionable responses taken by Tanium solutions as well on behalf of security analysts, as part of our journey, to kind of reinvent the SOC of the future. Right? And so essentially, it's been a deliberate effort by both teams to not provide incremental integrations, but something that offers a reimagined safety posture, especially that's enhanced, I would say amplified, in a world where pretty much every employee, is essentially a tech director now. But otherwise was not the case, when they were working in a normal enterprise office. >> All right, what's your take on this? I'll say what's different I'll say big news. >> Sure, yeah. I mean, if you look at why we decided that Google would have been the perfect partner for us, we have very large enterprises. We work with about 70 of the fortune 100, the USOD, a lot of these very large environments, and many of them were coming to us and telling us two things. The first one was the amount of data, that they were generating, that they needed to be able to process and analyze and be able to find insight from, was going exponentially up. And the second one was, in the new kind of post COVID world, the amount of work from home risks that they were seeing, and the kind of perfection they needed to achieve, on finding threats quickly and neutralizing them was actually also going up. And so between those two things, we started really looking for a partner, that we could accelerate with, to provide our customers with true world-class data analytics, retention, being able to visualize that data and then being able to act on that data through Tanium. And I think that the partnership that we've struck with Google and the work we've done with them, to make this seamless for our customers, to make it scale really well, even for the largest managed networks, is something we're really proud of. >> What's the history between Chronicle and Tanium. What's the, how far back does it go, and how would you guys categorize this time and point in time in terms of evolution of that partnership? >> So maybe I'll take a stab Sunil, then you can take one as well, you know. We've been working with Chronicle now for over a year. And we've got customers, who kind of pointed us in this direction, which is how we love to start partnerships. We had some customers who had a lot of faith, that Google was going to be able to crack this nut. And honestly many of our customers had been really struggling with this, with their current vendors at the time, for years. And we're really looking for Google, because Google was the company, that they saw as having the most credibility with massive, massive data sets. What we got surprised by actually, was that there were a bunch of different legs of the stool, that we could work with Google on. So not only data retention of Chronicle, but things like zero trust, which I think many people know Google actually invented the concept of. When we start thinking about thin client management. So we actually found that, there's a really expansive partnership here. And what we're doing with Chronicle, I think is the first kind of instantiation of that. But we expect that over the next even years, we've got a lot of room to run with Google, to really secure and help our customers. >> Sunil talk about the wave that you're riding on right now. 'Cause obviously the reality is, I won't use the term new normal, but the new reality is, COVID has forced everyone to look at basically an unexpected disruption that no one saw coming. Yeah, we can prepare for disasters and floods and hurricanes and whatnot, but this is unforeseen everybody working at home. I mean, I can imagine all the VPN vendors, freaking out who even needs a VPN. So, you know, the access methods is everything, it's mobile, home, home is the new office. It's not just, you know, connect to an access point, my son's gaming, my daughter is watching Netflix. I'm trying to do some video conferencing and it's a mix of consumer business all happening. This is a complex environment now. What does this mean? This relation, how does this connect the dots? Can you, can you expand on that. >> Yeah, I mean I think I hinted on this a little bit at the beginning John, is that, we think, you know, this is an, you know, an unprecedented opportunity to help accelerate digital transformation, that otherwise would have taken a few years for many enterprises to get to. That can now be done potentially in months and for some customers maybe even in weeks. And some examples of that, that we've seen are that, look, if you just took, if you just take Google as an company, to Orion's point, look, we invested many years worth of technology and IP that now we're slowly bringing out in the form of BeyondCorp product sets. But essentially of the fact that look, we should treat every employee as if they were a remote worker. We don't trust the network, we basically break transitive properties, which was one of the foundational issues with security in the enterprise, where I trust a network and the network is trusted by a desktop. And then if you penetrate one, you can penetrate everything else in the chain. And so when COVID hit, we went from essentially pretty much, a hundred thousand plus employees, working in distributed headquarters, but within the Google environment, to working from home within a week later, but retained the same sort of like, not productive the levels just, but actually the same safety levels that were much stronger. And so in many cases, what we are announcing, is that even though enterprises have come forward and said, look, yeah, we have some PaaS work solutions, just because this is a major change for us. Now that we are in it, for not just three months or six months, but potentially a longer period of time. Why not take the opportunity to replatform our security environments, so that we can actually be in a better state, when we actually exit out of this. We might actually never go back full time, but it can actually be a hybrid environment. So that's part of the reason, why I think we are so jazzed about the partnership, is that these are two examples, of products coming together to help replatform, at least one sets of, you know, traditional, if I can call it weaklings in the security ecosystem, that can now be sort of like replatformed. >> I was doing an interview actually last week, and I was kind of riffing on this idea. This is one big IoT experiment. I mean, people are devices here and everyone's connected, but it's all remote. It's changed the patterns of work and traffic and all kinds of paradigms. But this brings up the issue of the customer challenge. Everyone's going to look up their environment saying, look at, we now know the benefit of cloud it's clear. But I got to rethink the projects that are on the table, and get rid of the ones, that aren't going to be relevant, to where the world has shifted. It's not even a question of digital transfer. It's like, okay, what am I doubling down on. And what am I going to eliminate from the picture. So I've got to ask you guys, if you guys can comment, if I'm a customer that's what's going through my head, I got to survive, reinvent the foundation, and come out with a growth strategy, with a workforce, workplace, workloads, and workflows that are completely different. What's in it for me. What does this mean to me. This partnership, so how do you help me. What's in it for me. >> So I might take a stab at that, you know, I think that a lot of our customers, if we look at where they were at the beginning of the year, they'd been building on a pretty creaky foundation and just adding more and more layers to it. So, you know, in the security side, many of our customers have 20 or 30 or 50 different tools. And many of them are there, because they were there yesterday. They're not actually, if you were going to zero base budget, the way you were going to do security, they wouldn't be the tools you'd choose. And the interesting thing about this whole work from home transition, it is effectively a zero based budget for security, because a lot of the tools just basically don't work. So you think about a lot of the network tools, and when everybody's working from home, you don't own the network. You think about a lot of even the endpoint tools, that assumed that devices would be behind that network perimeter, and now just don't work over the internet. And so when we look at our customers, they're realizing they have to replatform, their security model, anyway. And what they're doing is they're now picking again. And what they get to do is they get to pick the platforms that they now trust in 2020, with the work from home environment as it is. And I think what it gives you as a customer, is a huge simplification of your environment. I mean, we talk to people every day, who were used to operating those 20 or 30, 50 tools, and they were spending 90% of their energy just operating those tools, not actually improving security and they were falling behind. If you look at what they're able to do now, they actually can go back to a starting point, where they think about what is the real threat I'm facing. What are the real platforms, I should be choosing today. And we're actually seeing huge increases, in our customer kind of adoption of our platform because that resistance to change, has been removed. People can't resist change anymore, change has come, and as a result of that, they get to choose what they would like now. >> That's a huge point, I want to just double down on that and redirect, and then we'll go to Sunil and his commentary, but I think you just hit the nail on the head. We're seeing the same kind of commentary. You said it really eloquently, but the thing is that, okay, let's just, if you believe what you just said, which I do going into zero base budgeting decisions, fresh look and everything. The problem is people are looking at the decisions and comparing what the bells and whistles were from the tools. So how do you advise customers to rethink like, okay, if it's a fresh look, it's a fresh look. It's not like, okay, the way we did it before, so a lot of times when you were evaluating products, a group gets to say, it doesn't have this bell or this whistle, 'cause that's the way we did it before. So you got to kind of separate out, this idea of you're got to go that direction. It's a full, fresh look. So how are customers doing that, 'cause that's really difficult. >> It's a super relevant question for today's world, because I think you're absolutely right. If you talk to the person who operated the compliance tool in a big bank, and you ask them, what do you need from that tool? They very quickly get the things, that if you just take the question, which is, I need to do compliance for the bank, what do I need to do compliance effectively? And you look at the answer that they give you, which is I need this check box here. I need this button here. I need this kind of minutiae that I'm used to, to be consistent with what I've been used to, for the last 10 years. Those two things are not the same. And what we've really been encouraging our customers to do is take a look back at your requirements. So you are processing credit cards, you need to be PCI regulated. You need to be able to answer to your vendors, how many copies of their software you're using. You need to be able to find an attacker, who's moving around your environment, and do that as quickly as possible. And then let's build from there what capabilities you need. And let's forget about whether the color scheme, of the logo at the top of the report is the same. Let's talk about the core capabilities. And it's a very freeing conversation actually, because what a lot of people start realizing, is they've been maintaining the status quo, for reasons that actually have nothing to do with efficacy, they have to do with comfort. And the curse and the beauty of the last six months, is no one's comfortable. So I don't care how comfortable you are with your tools. No one I know is comfortable today. And what it's giving us, is an opportunity to look past the old school comfort and think about how do we transition to the future. And I think it's actually going to galvanize a lot of positive change. You know, I was saying this before we went on air, but I don't think anybody wished, that COVID was the way, that we would end up in a position, where people have the appetite for change. But if there's a silver lining in the situation, that's it. And I really think that the CIOs and CEOs and CFOs and CSOs, really across the board, need to take advantage of the fact, that there's a discontinuity here, that allows us to throw out the old, and bring in things that are much more effective. >> Sunil that's some great tea up for you, because what he's saying basically saying is if you don't focus on the check boxes, because it was reasons why, and they'll give you, there's a long list, probably RFPs are the same way, we check in the boxes, okay, throw that out. And then you can, by the way, you can innovate on those check boxes differently, but still achieve the same outcome. I get that. But for Google Cloud, you guys have a great network. It's well known in the industry. Google's got a phenomenal network, hence powering Android and all the servers. We know that, with a cloud player, this is a great opportunity for you guys to be a fresh candidate for this kind of change. How are you guys talking about this internally? Because this really is, the goalposts have been moved and in favor of who can deliver. >> I think as both of you have been talking about, I think, look, I think the way I will, you know, maybe color this is, you know, when consumers got to a safer posture with the advent of iPhone, right? Even though it was much more productive, delightful, and there's a bunch of other things, ultimately though, if anything, things became safer, when you actually did computing on a phone. Just because it was an opinionated stack. Ultimately we believe, whether you come to cloud completely or you consume some stacks, the more opinionated they are, that's ultimately the only way, to reduce these moving parts that expose us to security issues. And that principle applied by the way in reliability too, right? I mean, you have to simplify stuff for things to actually work at six nines and so forth. So same things, apply in security. So imagine a world, where every employee now is sitting at home, maybe two years from now, they come back, they work in the Starbucks, but we had a virtual Chromebook experience, because a physical Chromebook of course, it's a goal to kind of get that out there, because on one hand we have the cloud, which is a full stack opinionated offering, but there's various elements of computing, still dispersed in the environment. And you were talking about IoT. Eventually we will get there, but just look at the employee's laptop, but productivity station and imagine the construct of a virtual Chromebook off, and that's an opinionated stack. And that's essentially a variant of what the joint offering between the two companies is essentially, you know, sort of aspiring to, is to provide that level of, you know, clarity and opinionation, that actually genuinely solves for some foundational security issues. And in doing so, you now have, an opinionated stack close to the user, the enterprise user is an opinion stack via mobile phones, close to the consumer user. And for all enterprises from a computing side, there's an opinion stack, whether it be Google or some of the other public clouds, right? And ultimately I think the world will move, into these few sets of these opinionated stacks at various points of control. And at least this particular partnership, is around making the first step towards, potentially one of those opinionated stacks, virtual Chromebook like experience, for the enterprise use. >> And I think this is the beginning, of the wave of the reality, that the edge of the network, whatever you want to call it. And you see this with end point detection, right I mean, everything's an endpoint now. I mean, I still think every, this is one big IoT device, and everything is just moving around. So zero trust is a big part of it, Google cloud, and this relationship kind of brings that to the next level. How does zero trust, attaining a mission intersect here. Because I mean, I see some obvious ones, we just talked about it, but what's the connection. >> Yeah, I think we'll hopefully, you know, talk more about it later in the year, as well as we can to come out with more integrations. But at the high level, I think the way to think about this would be, imagine that device as you were talking about, having an ability to actually send a strong set of signals, not just for detection and response, but for actually enforcing, you know, authentication and authorization as well, because ultimately identity needs to intersect, with the current stack, that we currently have between the two companies. And so when identity of the user, identity of the device, identity of you know, the context in which, you know, someone actually allows a user to access an application, these are all net new things, that need to be brought into the solution. We cannot then provide both the, you know, not just a safe way to kind of provide an, you know, an endpoint detection and response kind of opinion stack, but also essentially meet that part of an uber zero trust offering, that a customer can consume to ensure that look, you know, ultimately look, it doesn't really matter whether the employees at home they're using their own laptop. They're at Starbucks. They can come back to work, but ultimately they have this virtualized, sort of security ring, that protects and always constantly authorizes authenticates and provides a bunch of this security operations capabilities. So anyway, the simple answer is, you know, once we intersect identity, and a slew of BeyondCorp capabilities, into the current offering, that's how the next step towards, a more formidable zero trust offering force. >> Okay, Orion I'd love to get your thoughts, but if you both can answer question, that'd be great. I'd love to get your thoughts, a little gamification here. If you had to put the headline out on this news. Not the one on the press release, that's like perfectly written, like, I mean, bumper sticker. what is the real meaning, of this relationship in this news? If you had to put a headline out there, I think Washington, think New York post style maybe, or you know, something that can describe the news. >> I mean, I will admit, I am not known for being good at soundbites, so, I'll give you the one sentence, and you can help me pare it down. But I mean, really what it is, is I think Tanium got, the highest fidelity and point visibility and control out there. And I think Google's got the best data storage analytics retention cross-referencing we've ever seen. And when you combine those two things, it's incredibly powerful, for our enterprise users, and we've already seen customers, where it's been transformative. >> So you need a headline, that's good though , that's fine. You know, point projection solid. >> I think it's a much more descriptive nature, frankly, but I think my logical tagline, that I just keep, you know, sort of like the sound, but soundbite that I keep referring to is. Looking out the world needs a virtual Chromebook, to really feel safe at an end point level. And this is sort of like the first instantiation, of that core stack, that can at least get enterprise to start on that journey. >> You know, I think you guys run something really big here. And one of my personal observations, is one is the complexity of the telemetry coming, and I can see how you would go in there and connecting the dots between Google's backend, and your stuff coming together. You need to have that high powered energy, from the resource, but also there's a human element. People are working at home, whether you're a teacher, you're getting fished their spear fish, to targeted social engineering. So as people come home, and there's now multiple access points, there's more surface area. So every single endpoint needs to be protected. And I think people are kind of in the normal world, or outside of the tech industry saying, Oh, I get it now. We're not really protected. And this is not just sensor networks, or, you know, OT technology, you know, OT, it's really humans. And this is really where it's going. Isn't it guys? >> Okay. >> You should take it there, look, I think we do have a foundational principle here, which says, look as demonstrated in a postcode world, but your point John, or whether it be IoT, just distributed computing in general continues to expand. We should just assume, that the surface area for security issues only expense, right? And rather than trying to kind, of do a vacuum all of the surface area, what if you could take a foundational approach, that actually breaks the relationship, between expanded surface area means expanded exposure to PaaS. And so essentially the same approach that we took, with zero trust, which is, look, we just know we're going to get broken into. So just don't assume that your network is not safe, but still have a secure posture. Right? How did that come to be? I think if we can just apply that, more generally into this construct of a distributed enterprise, which says, look, the surface area is going to keep going, but let's break that correlation between surface area. Let's buy a more foundational construct, that says, look, it doesn't matter, if today, as you said this your device, tomorrow, it could be, you know, your son's laptop, that you use to actually log into your network and so forth. But ultimately though, it doesn't matter who you are, where you're accessing it from, what device you're using, or what network you're using, or which location, the safety posture is still very strong. >> That's awesome. >> Yeah. I will just add you're absolutely right. I mean, if you look at a customer, I'm thinking about today and I just heard this from their CIO, a couple of days ago, but they have one and a half million things, they're protecting today. They expect to have over 150 million in five years. And so you look at containerization, cloud mobility, all the work from home stuff. It's just going to make this a more and more complex, highly variant problem. We need to expect that. And I think a lot of people are very frustrated, that at the time, that expansion is happening, the network essentially did become a control point. You couldn't trust anymore. So the thesis that Google had around zero trust, actually became our entire world for most enterprises. When you look at that, we do owe our customers quantum jumps in capability, or they're just not going to catch up. And I think that the theoretical approach that we're taking here between Google and Tanium, lets our customers take one of those quantum jumps, where they're going to be seeing a lot more, they're going to be able to trust it a lot more. They're going to be able to allow devices, to have access to things, based on their current state and based on believing that we can extrapolate, whether their security on that device accurately. And that's something that I think a lot of customers have just never been able to do before. And frankly, I think it takes companies like this, to pair up and really invest in joining their technologies to be able to get that fabric that will get our customers materially forward. And you know, I'll just say one other thing, many of our customers have to literally like, you know, three or four months ago, we're in a position, where they were spending 60 or 70% of their security budgets on network. There's nowhere to spend that money today. That's actually productive. It gives them the ability to refactor what they're doing and the obligation to do it, because if they don't do it, I think is, you know, I was describing with the amount of increased assets, the amount of complexity, the lack of network control. If they don't do it, looking at the amount, of threat our customers are facing today, they're going to be under water really quickly. And so, you know, I'm proud that we get to get together here and give them a big step forward. And you know, I think there's an obligation on our industry, not to try and rewarm the same stuff, we've been doing for the last 20 years, and try and serve it to our customers again, but to really rethink the approach because it is a different world. >> Sunil you've been involved in a very, a lot of entrepreneurial ventures. You've been on these waves, that were misunderstood and then became understood. This is what we're getting at here. And what he's saying, essentially new expectations. We're going to drive that experience and then ultimately drive the demand, and people will either be out of business or in business. If you're a supplier, I'll give you the final word, you guys are in good positions. >> Especially in security John, more so than maybe any other infrastructure space, that I've been involved in. Most products have been built to solve problems with other products. And Orion just pointed out, I think this opportunity gives enterprises, clarity and vendors, clarity that look, you really have to take, you know, foundationally original approach, to solve problems, that can get customers to, if I can call it a function change, in their current safety posture. Right? And so that's really the core essence of the partnership is to sort of, rather than worrying about solving problems, with other products and so forth, is to use this opportunity, like I said, you have an opinionated view, to fundamentally change, the security posture of the endpoint once and for all. >> Well gentlemen, congratulations, on a great partnership, expanded partnership. Again, the world has changed. I love this fresh look. I think that's totally right on the money. New reality we're here. Thanks for you taking the time, to remote in from Seattle and the Bay area. Great to see you again at Google cloud. Thanks for coming in or a nice to meet you, and good luck with everything. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage, CUBE virtual coverage of Google OnAir next 2020. It's all virtual, virtualization has come in, and don't trust the network. You know, you got to watch those end points. Here with Google and Tanium great partnership news. I'm John for your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Over welcome to theCUBE's virtual coverage of Google Next on air. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here in Palo Alto, California for our remote interviews, part of our quarantine crew, getting all the stories that matter, Google Next OnAir, continues event through the summer. We're calling it the summer of Cloud. We got two great guests here, Sunil Potti, General Manager and Vice President of Cloud security at Google Cloud. And Orion Hindawi, Co founder and CEO of Tanium. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on today. Appreciate it. Great event you guys have on the container. I call the summer of Cloud. It's a lot of events that Google's having. So you guys and your team are doing a great job. But there's some hard news, you guys are announcing an expanded partnership together. Sunil, tell us what is the news today? >> Hey, John, first of all, great to see you again. Love being on theCUBE anytime and it's my honor to actually share the state system around with Orion and the Tatium team. So essentially, what we are announcing today is the fact that, as most of you know, especially in the new normal, with a distributed workforce, and potentially it being the safer normal down the road, it presents an unprecedented opportunity. I think, in our opinion that we can use this to accelerate potentially safer posture that otherwise would have taken years to build into the enterprise ecosystem that we could now bring forward in a potentially in the year 2020 or 2021. So the primary announcement is based on the fact that Tanium's core enterprise offering and Google Clouds conical offering are coming together to build a full stack offering for endpoint detection and response so that customers can have an end to end offering that's both powerful, and easy to use. All the way from the detection, response, remediation, and analytics all built together into one seamless, easy to consume offering for the global enterprise. And being delivered in such a way that it can take into account organizations of thousands of employees or hundreds of thousands of employees, all by the same Cloud native solution. >> All right, how about why you're excited about this deal? What's different about it? Obviously, there's a relationship here. What's so exciting about this story? >> Yeah, I think, Orion should comment as well. But look, I think the key thing that we partnered on initially was a customer driven technology centric integrations, where we went deep from a chronical perspective to ensure native integration between any MS products to send signals out of the box, as well as curated, enhanced, enriched so that they could be actionable responses taken by Tanium's solutions as well on behalf of security analysts, as part of our journey to reinvent soccer the future, right. And so essentially, it's been a deliberate effort by both teams to not provide incremental integrations, but something that offers a re-imagined safety posture, especially that's enhanced, I would say or amplified in a world where pretty much every employee is essentially a threat vector now, but otherwise was not the case when they were working in a normal enterprise off. >> All right, what's your take on this? I see what's different. I see new big news. >> Sure, yeah. I mean, if you look at why we decided that Google would have been the perfect partner for us. We have very large enterprises. We work with about 70 of the Fortune 100, the US DOD, a lot of these very large environments, and many of them were coming to us and telling us two things. The first one was the amount of data that they were generating that they needed to be able to process and analyze and be able to find insight from was growing exponentially. And the second one was in the new kind of post COVID world, the amount of work from home risk that they were seeing and the perfection they needed to achieve on finding threats quickly and neutralizing them was actually also going up. And so between those two things, we started really looking for a partner that we could accelerate with to provide our customers with true world class, data analytics, retention, being able to visualize that data and then being able to act on that data through Tanium. And I think that the partnership that we've struck with Google and the work we've done with them to make this seamless for our customers, to make it scale really well, even for the largest managed networks, is something we're really proud of. >> What's the history between Chronicle and Tanium? How far back does it go? And how would you guys categorize this time and point in time in terms of evolution of that partnership? >> So maybe I'll take a stab Sunil. And then you can take one as well. We've been working with Chronicle now for over a year. And we've got customers who pointed us in this direction, which is how we love to start partnerships. We had some customers who had a lot of faith that Google was going to be able to crack this nut. And honestly, many of our customers had been really struggling with this with their current vendors at the time for years. And we're really looking for Google, because Google was the company that they saw as having the most credibility with massive, massive datasets. What we got surprised by actually was that there were a bunch of different legs of the stool that we could work with Google on. So not only data retention of Chronicle, but things like zero trust, which I think many people know Google actually invented the concept of. When we start thinking about Thin Client Management. So we actually found that there's a really expensive partnership here. And what we're doing with Chronicle, I think, is the first instantiation of that. But we expect that over the next even years, we've got a lot of room to run with Google to really secure and help our customers. >> Sunil talk about the way that you're riding on right now because obviously, the reality is and I won't use the term new normal, but the new reality is COVID has forced everyone to look at basically an unexpected disruption that no one saw coming. Yeah, we could we can prepare for disasters and floods and hurricanes and whatnot. But this is unforeseen. Everybody working at home. I mean, I can imagine all the VPN vendors freaking out who even needs a VPN? So the access methods is everything. It's mobile, home, home is new office. It's not just connect to an access point. My son's gaming, my daughter's watching Netflix, I'm trying to do some video conferencing. It's a mix of consumer business all happening. This is a complex environment now. What does this mean, this relation? How does this connect the dots? Can you expand on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think I hinted on this a little bit at the beginning, is that we think this is an unprecedented opportunity to help accelerate digital transformation that otherwise would have taken a few years for many enterprises to get to, that can now be done, potentially, in months. And for some customers, maybe even in weeks. And some examples of that, that we've seen are that look, if you just take Google as a company, to Orion's point, look we invested many years worth of technology and IP that now we're slowly bringing out in the form of beyond Corp, product sets, but essentially of the fact that look, we should treat every employee as if they were a remote worker. We don't trust the network, we basically break transitive properties, which was one of the foundational issues with security in the enterprise, where I trust network and the network is trusted by a desktop. And then if you penetrate one, you can penetrate everything else in the chain. And so when COVID hit, we went from, essentially pretty much 100,000 plus employees working in distributor headquarters, but within the Google environment to working from home within a week later, but retained the same sort of, not productivity levels just, but actually the same safety levels that were much stronger. And so in many cases, what we are now seeing is that even though enterprises have come forward and said, "Look, yeah, we have some patchwork solutions "just because this is a major change for us. "Now that we are in it "for not just three months or six months, "but potentially a longer period of time, "why not take the opportunity "to replatform our security environments "so that we can actually be in a better state, "when we actually exit out of this environment. "Where we might actually never go back full time, "but it can actually be a hybrid run." So that's part of the reason why I think we're so jazzed about the partnership is that these are two examples of products coming together to help replatform at least one sets of traditional, if I can call it weak links in the security ecosystem that can now be sort of repacked. >> I was doing an interview actually, last week, and I was kind of riffing on this idea. This is one big IoT experiment. I mean, people are devices here, everyone's connected, but it's all remote, it's change the patterns of work and traffic and all kind of paradigms. But this brings up the issue of the customer challenge. Everyone's going to look at their environment saying, "Look, we now know the benefit of Cloud, it's clear, "but I got to rethink the projects that are on the table "and get rid of the ones that aren't going to be relevant "to where the world has shifted." It's not even a question of Digital Trends. It's like, okay, what am I doubling down on and what am I going to eliminate from the picture. So I got to ask you guys, if you guys can comment if I'm a customer, that's what's going through my head I got to survive, reinvent the foundation and come out with a growth strategy with a workforce, workplace, workloads, and workflows that are completely different. What's in it for me? What does this mean to me this partnership? So how do you help me what's in it for me? >> So I might take a stab at that. I think that a lot of our customers, if we look at where they were at the beginning of the year, they'd been building on a pretty creaky foundation and just adding more and more layers to it. So in the security side, many of our customers have 20, or 30, or 50, different tools, and many of them are there, because they were there yesterday. They're not actually, if you were going to zero based budget the way you were going to do security, they wouldn't be the tools you'd choose. And the interesting thing about this whole work from home transition, is it is effectively a zero based budget for security because a lot of the tools just basically don't work. So you think about a lot of the network tools and when everybody's working from home, you don't own the network. You think about a lot of even the end point tools that assumed that devices would be behind that network perimeter and now just don't work over the internet. And so when we look at our customers, they're realizing they have to re-platform their security model, anyway. And what they're doing is they're now picking again. And what they get to do is they get to pick the platforms that they now trust in 2020, with the work from home environment as it is. And I think what it gives you as a customer is a huge simplification of your environment. I mean, we talk to people every day, who were used to operating those 20 or 30, 50 tools, and they were spending 90% of their energy, just operating those tools, not actually improving security, and they were falling behind. >> That's a great-- >> If look at what they're able to do now. They actually can go back to a starting point where they think about what is the real threat I'm facing? What are the real platforms I should be choosing today? And we're actually seeing huge increases in our customer adoption of our platform. Because that resistance to change has been removed. People can't resist change anymore. Change has come. And as a result of that, they get to choose what they would like now. >> That's a huge point, I want to just double down on that redirect. And then we'll go to Sunil and his commentary. But I think you just hit the nail on the head. We are seeing the same commentary. You said it really eloquently, but the thing is, is that okay, if you believe what you just said, which I do, going into zero based budgeting decisions, fresh look at everything. The problem is people are looking at the decisions and comparing what the bells and whistles were from the tools. So how do you advise customers to rethink like, "Okay, if it's a fresh look, it's a fresh look." It's not like, okay, with the way we did it before. So a lot of times when you're evaluating products, a group gets together and say, "It doesn't have this bell or this whistle, "because that's the way we did it before." So you get to separate out this idea if you're going to go with that. It's a full fresh look. So how are customers doing that? Cause that's really difficult. >> It's a super relevant question for today's world, because I think you're absolutely right. If you talk to the person who operated the compliance tool in a big bank, and you ask them, "What do you need from that tool?" They very quickly get the things that if you just take the question, which is I need to do compliance for the bank, what do I need to do compliance effectively? And you look at the answer that they give you, which is I need this checkbox here, I need this button here, I need this minutia that I'm used to, to be consistent with what I've been used to for the last 10 years, those two things are not the same. And what we've really been encouraging our customers to do is take a look back at your requirements. So you are processing credit cards, you need to be PCI regulated. You need to be able to answer to your vendors, how many copies of their software you're using. You need to be able to find an attacker who's moving around your environment and do that as quickly as possible. And then let's build from there, what capabilities you need. And let's forget about whether the color scheme of the logo at the top of the report is the same. Let's talk about the core capabilities. And it's a very freeing conversation, actually, because what a lot of people start realizing is they've been maintaining the status quo, for reasons that actually have nothing to do with efficacy. They have to do with comfort, and the curse, and the beauty of the last six months is, no one's comfortable. So I don't care how comfortable you are with your tools, no one I know is comfortable today. And what it's giving us is an opportunity to look past the old school comfort and think about how do we transition to the future. And I think it's actually going to galvanize a lot of positive change. I was saying this before we went on air, but I don't think anybody wished that COVID was the way, that we would end up in a position where people have the appetite for change, but if there's a silver lining in the situation, that's it. And I really think that CIOs and CEOs and CFOs and CSOs, really across the board need to take advantage of the fact that there's a discontinuity here that allows us to throw out the old and bring in things that are much more effective. >> Sunil, that's a great tip for you. Because what he's basically saying is, if you don't focus on the check boxes, because there was reasons why, there's a long list probably RFPs are the same way, but we check in the boxes, okay, throw that out. By the way, you can innovate on those check boxes differently, but still achieve the same outcome, I get that. But for Google Cloud, you guys have a great network. It's well known in the industry, Google's got a phenomenal network, hence powering Android, and all the servers. We know that. With a Cloud player, this is a great opportunity for you guys to be a fresh candidate for this change. How are you guys talking about this internally, because this really is the goalposts have been moved in favor of who can deliver. >> Yeah, I think as both of you have been talking about it, look, I think the way I will maybe color this is, when consumers got to a safer posture with the advent of iPhone, right? Even though it was much more productive, delightful, and there's a bunch of other things. Ultimately, though, if anything, things became safer when you actually did computing on a phone, just because it was an opinionated stack. Ultimately, we believe whether you come to Cloud completely, or you consume some stacks, the more opinionated they are, that's ultimately the only way to reduce these moving parts that expose us to security issues. And that principles apply, by the way in reliability too, right? I mean, you have to simplify stuff for things to actually work at six nines and so forth. So same things apply in security. So imagine a world where every employee now is sitting at home. Maybe two years from now they come back they work in the Starbucks, but we had a virtual Chromebook experience. Because a physical Chromebook, of course, it's our goal to get that out there. Because on one hand, we have the Cloud, which is a full stack opinionated offering, but there's various elements of computing still dispersed in the environment. And you're talking about IoT, eventually, we'll get there, but just look at the employee's laptop or productivity station and imagine the construct of a virtual Chromebook off. And that's an opinionated stack. And that's essentially a variant of what the joint offering between the two companies is essentially aspiring to, is to provide that level of clarity and opinionation that actually genuinely solves for some foundational security issues. And in doing so, you now have a, essentially a opinionated stack close to the user. The enterprise user is a opinion stack via mobile phones close to the consumer user. And for all enterprises from a computing side, there's an opinion stack, whether it be Google or some of the other public Clouds, right. And ultimately, I think the world will move into these few sets of these opinion stacks at various points of control. And at least this particular partnership is around making the first step towards potentially one of those opinionated stacks. Allow virtual Chromebooks like experience for the enterprise users. >> And I think this is the beginning of the wave of the reality that the edge of the network, whatever you want to call it, and you see this with endpoint detection, right? I mean, everything's an endpoint now. I mean, I still think this is one big IoT device and everything's just moving around. So zero trust is a big part of it, Google Cloud, and this relationship brings that to the next level. How does zero trust and Tanium mission intersect here? Because I see some obvious ones we just talked about, but what's the connection? >> Yeah, I think and we'll hopefully talk more about it later in the year as well as we can and come up with more integrations. But at the high level, I think the way to think about this would be, imagine that device as you were talking about having an ability to actually send a strong set of signals, not just for detection and response, but for actually enforcing authentication and authorization as well. Because ultimately, identity needs to intersect with the current stack that we currently have between the two companies. And so when identity of the user, identity of the device, identity of... The context in which someone actually allows a user to access an application, these are all net new things that need to be brought into the solution to then provide both not just a safe way to provide an endpoint detection and response opinionated stack, but to also essentially make that part of an Uber zero trust offering, that a customer can consume, to ensure that, ultimately look, it doesn't really matter whether the employee is at home, they're using their own laptop, they're at Starbucks, they can come back to work, but ultimately they have this virtualized security ring that protects and always constantly authorizes, authenticates, and provides a bunch of this security operations capabilities beyond. >> So anyway-- >> The simple answer is, once we intersect identity and a slew of beyond Corp capabilities into the current offering, that's how the next step towards a more formidable zero trust offering falls. >> Okay, Orion, I'd love to get your thoughts, but if you both can answer this question, that'd be great. I'd love to get your thoughts little gamification here. If you had to put the headline out on this news, not the one on the press release that's like perfectly written. I mean bumper sticker. What is the real meaning of this relationship in this news? If you get to put a headline out there, Think New York Post style maybe or something that's can describe the news. >> I mean, I will admit, I'm not known for being good at sound bites. So I'll give you the one sentence and you can help me pair it down. But I mean, really what it is, is I think Tanium has got the highest fidelity and visibility and control out there. And I think Google's got the best data storage analytics, retention, cross referencing we've ever seen. And when you combine those two things, it's incredibly powerful for our enterprise users. And we've already seen customers where it's been transformative. >> Sunil headline-- (both talking) No, that's fine, protection solid. >> I think it's a much more descriptive nature, frankly, but I think my logical tagline that I just keep sort of the soundbite that I keep referring to is, look, you know, the world needs a virtual Chromebook to really feel safe at an endpoint level. And this is the first instantiation of that core stack that can at least get enterprise to start on that journey. >> I think you guys run something really big here. And one of my personal observations is, one is the complexity of the telemetry coming back and I can see how you would go in there and connecting the dots between Google's back end and your stuff coming together. You need to have that high powered energy from the resource. But also there's a human element, people are working at home, whether you're a teacher, they're getting you getting fished, they're spear fished, they're targeted social engineering. So as people come home, and there's now multiple access points, there's more surface area. So every single endpoint needs to be protected. And I think people in the normal world or outside of the tech industry saying, "Oh, I get it now. "We're not really protected." And this is not just sensor networks or OT technology, OT it's really humans. This is really where it's going, isn't it, guys? >> I chime in and then maybe Orion you should take it there. Cause look, I think we do have a foundational principle here, which says look, as demonstrated in a post code world. But your point, John, whether it be IoT, just to distributed computing in general continues to expand, we should just assume that the surface area for security issues on the expense, right. And rather than trying to do a rakamole of the surface area, what if you could take a foundational approach that actually breaks that relationship between expanded surface area means, expanded exposure to that. And so essentially, the same approach that we took with zero trust, which is, look, we just know we're going to get broken into. So just don't assume that your network is not safe, but still have a secure posture, right? How did that come to be? I think if you can just apply that, more generally into this construct of a distributed enterprise, which says, "Look, the surface area is going to keep going, "but let's break that correlation "between surface area to rates "buy a more foundational construct." That says, "Look, doesn't matter if today it's your, "as you said, this is your device. "Tomorrow, it could be your son's laptop "that you use to actually log into your network "and so forth." But ultimately, though, doesn't matter who you are, where you're accessing it from, what device you're using, or what network you're using, which location, the safety posture is still very strong. >> That's awesome. >> Yeah, I will just add, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you look at a customer I'm thinking about today, and I just heard this from their CIO a couple days ago, but they have one and a half million things they're protecting today, they expect to have over 150 million in five years. And so you look at containerization, cloud mobility, all the work from home stuff, it's just going to make this a more and more complex, highly variant problem, we need to expect that. And I think a lot of people are very frustrated that at the time that expansion is happening, the network essentially did become a control point you couldn't trust anymore. So the thesis that Google had around zero trust, actually became our entire world for most enterprises. When you look at that we do owe customers Quantum Jumps in capability, or they're just not going to catch up. And I think that the theoretical approach that we're taking here, between Google and Tanium lets our customers take one of those Quantum Jumps, where they're going to be seeing a lot more, they're going to be able to trust it a lot more. They're going to be able to allow devices to have access to things based on their current state and based on believing that we can extrapolate whether there's security on that device accurately. And that's something that I think a lot of customers have just never been able to do before. And frankly, I think it takes companies like this to pair up and really invest in joining their technologies to be able to get that fabric that will get our customers materially forward. And I'll just say one other thing. Many of our customers up to literally, three or four months ago, we're in a position where they were spending 60 or 70% of their security budgets on network. There's nowhere to spend that money today that's actually productive. It gives them the ability to refactor what they're doing, and the obligation to do it. Because if they don't do it, I think as, I was describing with the amount of increased assets, the amount of complexity, the lack of network control, if they don't do it, looking at the amount of threat our customers are facing today, they're going to be underwater really quickly. And so I'm proud that we get to get together here and give them a big step forward. And I really, I think there's an obligation on our industry, not to try and re-warm the same stuff we've been doing for the last 20 years and try and serve it to our customers again, but to really rethink the approach because it is a different world. >> Sunil you've been involved in a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, you've been on these waves that were misunderstood and then became understood. This is what we're getting out here and we saying essentially new expectations, we're going to drive that experience, and then ultimately drive the domain. And people will either be out of business or in business. If you're a supplier, I'll give you the final word. you guys are in good position. >> Yeah, I say that, especially in security gone, more so than maybe any other infrastructure space that I've been enrolled in. Most products have been built to solve problems with other products. And as Orion just rightfully pointed out, I think this opportunity gives enterprises clarity and vendors clarity, that look, you really have to take a foundationally, original approach to solve problems that can get customers to, if I can call it a staff function change in their current safety posture, right? And so that's really the core essence of the partnership is to, rather than worrying about solving problems with other products and so forth, is to use this opportunity, like I said, to have an opinionated view, to fundamentally change the security posture of the endpoint once and for all. >> Well, gentlemen, congratulations on a great partnership, expanded partnership. Again, the world is changing. I love this fresh look. I think that's totally right on the money. The new reality, we're here. Thanks for you taking the time to remote in from Seattle and the Bay Area. Sunil great to see you again at Google Cloud. Thanks for coming in. Orion, nice to meet you and good luck with everything. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's virtual coverage of Google OnAir next 2020. It's all virtual, virtualization is come in. And don't trust the network. You got to watch those endpoints. Here with Google and Tanium great partnership news. I'm John Furrier host of theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. It is a cute conversation. >> Levan, Welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm John for a host of the Cube here in our Cube Studios in Palo Alto, California. Harder Silicon Valley world startups are happening on the venture capitalists air. Here we have with us. O'Neill, Deli Wall, Who is the general partner Amplify Partners and Founder co found with Mike Dauber. You guys have a very successful firm. I've known you since the beginning. When you started this firm. You guys were very successful on your third fund. Congratulations. Thank you. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in. It's always fun >> to be back. Yours? First time we're doing it in person. >> Local as it posted out of the conference. Yeah. Got our studio here. We're kicking off two days a week. Soon to be five days or weeks. Folks watching studio will be open for a lot more. Start up coverage. So great to have you in. And congrats on 10 years for you guys. 10 years of the Cube. 10th year of'em world would do in a big special. So nice we're excited. Well, for another great 10 years have been a lot of fun. A lot of interesting things happen those 10 years and again, you've been on the track to foot during that time. Yeah, on, by the way, Congratulations, fastly when public, thank you very much. And you also investing early investor in Data Dog, which you probably can't comment on, but they look like they're gonna go public. It's a great business >> and it's moving the right direction. And I think they got a lot of happy users. So there's more good stuff in the future for them. >> So you guys came out early, Made big bets. They're paying off two of them. Certainly one. Did another one come around the bikemore. Take it. Give us update on Amplify Partners Current fund. Third Fund gives the numbers. How much? What do you guys investing in with some of the thesis? What's the vision? >> Yeah, the vision is really simple. So amplify has been around from the beginning to work with technical founders. And really, if you wanted to stop there, you could you know, we're the people that engineers, academics, practitioners, operators that they go to get their first capital when they are thinking about starting a company or have a niche that they just feel the need to scratch. We tend to be first call for those folks a lot of times before they even know that they're going to start something. And so we've been doing that. Investing at seeding Siri's A with those people in these really technical enterprise markets now for seven years. Third fund most recent funds a $200,000,000 fund and that has us doing everything from crazy pie in the sky. First check into, ah, somebody with wild vision to now bigger Siri's a lead Rounds, which we're doing a lot more of two. >> So on the business model, just to get a clear personal congratulations Really good venturing by the way. That's what venture capital should be First money in, You know, people not doing the big round. So that's a congratulated, successful thank you now that you have 200,000,000 Plus, are you file doing follow on rounds? Are you getting in on the pro rat eyes? Are you guys following on? Because he's Sonny's big head, sir. Pretty, pretty big. >> Yeah, we've been doing that from the beginning and I think we've always wanted to be people who will start early and go along. We've invested in every round that fastly did we invested in every round that data dog did. So yeah, we're long term supporters and we can go along with the company's. But our differentiation isn't showing up and being the guys who were gonna lead your Siri's g round at a $3,000,000,000 valuation, which might as well be your AIPO were really there to help people figure out how to recruit a Kick ass team and figure out how to find product market fit and get that engine working >> and also help be a friend of the on the same side of the tables and rather than being the potentially out of the side. So the question is, I know you guys do step away and don't go on board. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't. Was there a formula there? Do you go on the boards as further in the round? You happy the relief? It's a >> mix of, uh, you know, we talked about a couple of these cos fastly. I've been on the board since Day zero and data dog. I was never on the board. And you know what we do tend to be those pretty active. So people come work with us when they go. I've got this vision. I know where I want to go. But when I think about the hard things I've got to do over the 1st 2 to 3 years of a company's life, you know who I want by my side and not the person who wants to be my boss or tell me what to do or tell me why they need to own 1/3 of my company or control four seeds on my board. But who kind of what's it wants to sit shoulder to shoulder with me and probably has a long list of companies that look just like mine. Uh, that tell me that they're going to decent partner. >> We've had a lot of fun together. You and Mike the team and fly. Great party. Great networking. You gotta do that. >> Thank you. Great. Great party. Should hopefully my >> tombstone. Well, you gotta have the networking, and that's always good. Catalyst. That lubricant, if they say, is to get people going. But you guys were hanging out with us and the big data space that had Duke World. We saw Cloudera got to activist board members. That's not looking good there. It's unfortunate big friend of Amer Awadallah, but what ended up happening was cloud Right Cloud kind of changed the game a little bit, didn't change big data as an industry was seeing eye machine learning booming. So, you know, big data had duped change certainly cloud our speculation. But looking back over those 10 years, you saw the rise of the cloud really become Maur of a force than some people thought that most people thought Dev Ops really became the cultural shift. If I had to point to anything over the 10 years, it's Dev Ops, which is implies day to talk about your reaction to that because certainly independent on enabler, but also change the game a bit. >> It has its exploded. There's a couple things in there, so I think there's been a lot of innovation that's coming in the cloud platforms. There's a lot of innovation that cloud platforms have sucked up. We look at that. A lot of guys who back startups, one of things we always say is Hey, is this a primitive? Is this an infrastructure primitive? Because if it is, it's probably gonna be best delivered by a big platform unless you're able to deliver a very compelling and differentiated solution or service around it. And that's different. You know, it's it's different than having a solely a a p I accessible primitive that, you know you would swap out with the next thing if it was, you know, two cents cheaper or 2% faster. So when I think about what's been happening in the cloud, this kind of cloud to, oh, phenomena starts coming up, which is a lot of hell that excited very early on. It was about storage and compute and the real basic building blocks. But now you see people building really compelling experiences for developers, for database engineers for application developed owners all the way up and down this stack that yeah, there cloud companies, but they look a heck of a lot like more like solutions. And, you know, we've mentioned a couple companies in our portfolio that air going great. But there there's a ton of companies that we admire. You know, I look at what the folks that at Hashi Corp have done and what they continue to do. You know what a great business in in security and in giving people automation and configuration that that hasn't been there before. That's a phenomenal I >> mean, monitoring you mentioned is a monitoring to point out going on, he said. Pager duty Got a dining trace. These companies public this year, both public, and you got more coming around the corner, you got analytics is turning. That's calling it mean monitoring has been around for a long time. Observe ability. Now it's observe ability is the monitoring two point. Oh, and that's taking advantage of this Dev Ops Growth. Yeah, this is really the big deal. >> Yeah, well, it's if you're really getting into. And what a lot of this comes down to is velocity, right? A lot of people are trying to deliver software faster, deliver it more reliably, take away the bottlenecks that air between the vision that a product person has the fingers on the keyboard and the delightful experience that a user gets and that has a lot of gates. And I think one of the things that Dev Ops is really enabled is how do you shrink that time? And when you're trying to shrink that time and you're trying to say, Hey, if someone's can code it, we can push it well, that's a great way to do things except if you don't know what you've pushed and things were failing. So as velocity increases, the need to have an understanding of what's going on is going right alongside of it. >> So I want to get your thoughts on enterprise scale because cloud 2.0, it really is about enterprise. You guys have invested in pure cloud native startups. You've invested a networking invested in open sores. You guys house will have, ah, struggle. You are. But I have a strong view on Dev, Ops and Cloud to point out. But the enterprise is now experiencing that, and you guys also done a lot of enterprise deals. What's the intersection of the enterprise as it comes in with cloud two point? Oh, you're seeing Intelligent Edge being discussed Hybrid multi cloud, these air kind of the structural big kind of battle grounds with the changes. How do you guys look at that? How do you invest in that? How do you look for startups in that area? >> Yeah, well, I think we invest in it by starting from the perspective of the customer. What's the problem? And the problem is, a lot of times people know their security. There's compliance. And a lot of cases. There's a legacy infrastructure, right? But the it's not a green field environment is nowhere more applicable than in the enterprise. And so when you think about customers that are gonna need to accommodate the investments the last five and 10 years as well as this beautiful new vision of what the future is, you know you're talking basically talking about every enterprise CEOs problems. So we think a lot about companies that can solve those riel clear enterprise pain points security. One of them, um, we've had a bunch of successful cloud security companies that have been acquired already. We've got great stuff in compliance and data management and awesome company like Integris. That's up in Seattle and in really making sure that projects and software works well with legacy and more traditional enterprise environments, companies like replicated down in L. A. Um, you know, those folks have really figured out what it means to deliver modern on premise software and modern on premise really is, you know, in your V p c in your own environment in your own cloud. But that's on Prem Now that is what on Prem really looks like no one's rack and stack and servers in the closet. It's cloud operations. But if you're going to do that and you're gonna integrate all those legacy investments you've made in an audit, Maxis control et cetera, and you wanna put that together with modern cloud applications, your sass vendors, et cetera. You know you can't really do that in the native cloud unless you can really make it work for the enterprise. >> What is some of the market basket sectors that you see? Where the market second half of our market sectors that have a market basket of companies forming around it? You mentioned drivability. Obviously, that's one we're seeing. Clear map of a landscape developed there. Yeah, okay. Is there other areas just seeing a landscape around this cloud to point out that that are either knew or reconfigurations of other markets? Machine learning What's what. The buckets? What the market's out there that people are clustering around with some of the big >> high level. Well, I think one of things you're gonna see talking about new markets and people people. There's a bunch of It'll tell you what's already happening in history today. But if you want to talk about what's coming, that isn't really on people's radar screen, I think there's a lot that's happening in machine learning and data science infrastructure. And if you're a cloud vendor in the public cloud today, you are really ramping up quickly to understand what the suite of offerings are that you're gonna offer to both ML developers as well as traditional, you know, non machine learning natives to help them incorporate. You know what is really a powerful set of tools into their applications, and that could be model optimization. It could be, um, helping manage cost and scalability. It could be working on explain ability. It could be working on, um, optimizing performance with the introduction of different acceleration techniques. All of that stack is really knew. You know, people gobbled up tensorflow from Google, and that was a great example of what you could do if you turned on ml specific. You know, tooling for for developers. But I think there's a lot more coming there, and we're just starting to see the beginning. >> It's interesting you bring this up because I've been thinking about this and I really haven't been talking about a publicly other than the cloud to point. It was kind of a generic area, but you're kind of pointing out the benefits of what cloud does. I mean, the idea of not having to provision something or invest a lot of cash to just get something up and running fast with this machine learning tooling that's the big problem was stacking everything up and getting it all built >> right goes back. The velocity were talking about earlier, right? >> So velocity is the key to success. Could be any category to be video. It could be, um, you know, some anything. So we're >> also seeing another. The other side of it is, is another form of velocity is we're going to Seymour that's happening and things that look like low code or no code, so lowering the barriers for someone doesn't have to be a true native or an expert in domain, but can get all the benefits of working with, Let's say, ml tooling, right? How do you make this stuff more accessible? So you don't need a phD from Berkeley or Stanford to go figure it out right? That's a huge market. That's just stop happening. We've got a ah phenomenal come way company in New York called Runway ML that has huge adoption. Their platform and their magic is Hey, here's how we're gonna bring ML to the creative class. If you're creative and you want to take advantage of ML techniques and the videos you're working on, the content that you're creating, maybe there's something you can do here at the Cube. You know, these guys were figure out how to do that and saying, Look, we know you're not a machine learning native. Here's some simple, primitive >> Well, this screen, you know, doesn't talk about video, but serious. We have a video cloud of people have seen it out there, demo ing, seeing highlights going around. But you bring up a good point. If we want to incorporate State machine learning into that, I can just connect to a service. I mean slack, I think, is the poster child for how they grew a service that's very traditional a message board put a great you around it. But the A P I integrations were critical for that. They've created a great way to do that. So this is the whole service is game. Yeah, this is the velocity and adding functionality through service is >> Yeah, And this is this this idea that, um the workflow is what matters. I think it has not traditionally been a thing that we talked a lot about an enterprise infrastructure. It was. Here's your tool. It's better than the previous two or three years ago. Throat the new ones by this one. And now people are saying, Well, I don't want to be wed to the tool. What I really want to understand is a process in a workflow. How should I do this? Right? And if I If I do that right, then you're not gonna be opinionated as to whether I'm using Jiro for you know, you're for managing issues or something else or if it's this monitoring the other. >> So I got to get the VC perspective on this because what you just said, she pointed out, is what we've been talking about as the new I p. The workflow is the I P. That translates to an application which then could be codified and scaled up with infrastructure, cloud and other things that becomes the I P. How do you guys identify that? Is that do you first? Do you agree with that? And then, too, how do you invest into that? Because it's not your traditional few of things. If that's the case, do you agree with it? And if you do, how do you invest in? >> I've modified slightly. It's the marriage of understanding that work flow with the ability to actually innovate and do something different. That's the magic. And so I'll give you a popular problem that we see amongst a lot of start ups that come see us. Uh, I am the best, and I'll pick on machine learning for a second. I've you know, I've got the best natural language processing team in this market. We're going to go out and solve the medical coding and transcription and building problem. Hey, sounds awesome. You got some great tech. What do you know about medical transcription and building? Uh, we gotta go hire that person. Do you know how doctors work? Do you know how insurance companies work. That's kind of Byzantine. How? You know, payers and providers, we're gonna work together. We'll get back to you that companies not gonna be that successful in the marriage of that work. >> Full knowledge. Good idea. Yeah, expertise in the work edge of the workflow. >> Well, traditionally, you get excited about the expertise in attack and what you realize in a lot of these areas. If you care about work full, you care about solutions. It's about the marriage of the two. So when you look across our portfolio in applied A I and machine learning, we've actually got shockingly nine companies now that are at the intersection of, um, machine intelligence and health care, both pre clinical and clinical. And people are like, Wow, that's really surprising for, ah, for an infrastructure firm or an enterprise focus firm, like amplifying we're going. No, you know, there's there's groundbreaking ML technology, but we're also finding that people know there's really high value verticals and you put domain experts in there who really understand the solutions, give them powerful tools, and we're seeing customers just adopted >> and that, unlike the whole full stack kind of integration if you're gonna have domain experts in the edge of that work flow, you have the data gathered. It's a data machine learning. I can see the connection. They're very smart, very clever. So I want to get your thoughts on two areas around this cloud to point. I think that come up a lot. Certainly machine learning. You mentioned one of them, but these other ones come up all the time as 2.0, Problems and opportunities. Cloud one. Dato storage, Computing storage. No problem. Easy coat away. Cloud two point. Oh, Networking Insecurity. Yeah, So as the cloud as everyone went to the cloud and cloud one dato there now the clouds coming out of the cloud on premise. So you got edge of the network. So intelligent edge security if you're gonna have low code and no could have better be secure on the cover. So this has become too important. Points your reaction to networking and security as an investor in this cloud. 2.0, vision. >> Yeah, there's different pieces of it. So networking The closer you go to the edge, you say the word ej and edges, you know, a good bit of it is networking, and it's also executing with limited resource is because we could debate what the edge means for probably three hours. >> Writing is very go there, but what it certainly means is you >> don't have a big data center. That's Amazon scale to run your stuff. So you've got to be more efficient and optimized in some dimension. So people that are really at the intersection of figuring out how to move things around efficiently, deliver with speed and reduce late and see giving platforms to developers at the edge, which, you know if you've one of the big reasons for faster going public was to bring their edge. Developments story out to the larger market. Um, absolutely agree with that as it as it relates to broader security. We're seeing security started, stop being a cyclical trend and started becoming a secular one pretty much at the moment the cloud exploded and those things are not, You know, it's not just a coincidence, as people got Maur comfortable with giving up control of the stuff that that had their arms around for years, a perimeter right at the same time that they say we're going through everything online and connect everything up and get over developers whatever they want and bringing all our partners to our. The amount of access to systems grew dramatically right. At the same time, people handed over a lot of these traditional work flows and processes and pieces of infrastructure. So, yeah, I think a lot of people right now are really re platforming to understand what it means to be to build securely, to deploy securely, to run securely. And that's not always a firewall rack and stack boxes and scan packets type of a game. >> Yeah, I'm serious, certainly embedded. And everything's not just part of the applications everywhere. That's native. Yeah, final question for you. What do you guys investing in now? What's the hot areas you mention? Machine learning? Give a quick plug for your key investments. What's the pitch? The entrepreneur? >> Yeah, so again are pitched. The entrepreneur really hasn't changed from Day zero, and I don't see it changing anytime in the future, which is if you're a world beating technologists, you know you want someone who understand what it's like to work with other world beating technologists and take him from start upto I po And that's the thing that we know how to do both in previous career is as well as in the history of Amplified. That's the pitch. The things that we're really excited right now is, um, what does it look like when the best academic experts in the world who understand new areas of machine learning, who are really able to push the forefront of what we're seeing in reinforcement, learning and machine vision and natural language processing are able to think beyond the narrow confines of what the tech can do and really partner of the domain experts? So there is a lot of domain specific applied A i N M l that we're really excited about thes days. We talked about health care, but that is just the tip of the iceberg we're excited about. Financialservices were excited about traditional enterprise work flows. I'd say that that's one big bucket. Um, we're is excited about the developer as we've ever been. >> You know, you and I were talking before he came on camera for the cube conversation. Around our early days in the industry, we were riffing on the O S. I, you know, open systems interconnect, stack if you look at what that did, Certainly it didn't always get standardize. That kind of dinner is up with T C p I p layer, but still, it changed. That changed the game in the computing industry. Now, more than ever, this trend that we're on the next 10 years is really gonna be about stacks involving and just complete horizontal scalability. Elastic resource is new ways to develop Apple case. I mean a completely different ball game. Next 10 years, your your view of the next 10 years as this 1000 flowers start to bloom with stacks changing in new application methods. How do you see it? Yeah, well, >> what Os? I was a great example of this trend that we go through every few months. So many years. You, you, somebody create something new. It's genius. It's maybe a little bit harder than it needs to be in. At some point, you wanted to go mass market and you introduce an abstraction. And the abstractions continue to work as ways to bring more people in and allow them not to be tough to bottom experts. We've done it in the technology industry since the sixties, you know, thank you. Thank you. Semiconductor world All the way on up. But now I think the new abstractions actually look a heck of a lot like the cloud platforms. Right? They're abstractions. People don't. People want toe. Say things like, I am going to deploy using kubernetes. I want a container package. My application. Now let me think from that level. Don't have don't have me think about particular machines don't have to think about a particular servers. That's one great example developments. The same thing. You know, when you talk about low code and no Koda's ideas, it's just getting people away from the complexity of getting down in the weeds. So if you said, What's the next 10 years look like? I think it's going to be this continual pull of making things easier and more accessible for business users abstracting, abstracting, abstracting and then right up into the point where the abstractions get too generalized and then innovation will come in behind it. >> As I always say in the venture business, cool and relevant works and making things simple, easy use and reducing the steps it takes to do something. It's always a winning formula. >> That's pretty good. Don't >> start to fund a consistent Sydney Ellen. Of course not. The cube funds coming in the next 10 years celebrating 10 years. Great to see you. And it's been great to have you on this journey with you guys and amplify. Congratulations. Congrats on all your success is always a pleasure. Appreciate it. Take care. Okay. I'm here with steel. Dolly. Well, inside the key studios. I'm John for your Thanks for watching.

>> Voiceover: Live! From Anahiem, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next, here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Potti, he is the chief product and development officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Glad to be here. >> So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage there was many many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? >> Yeah, I mean (inaudible) so in fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always teases me that all I do is essentially change the timeline but the same slideshow is up. But you know, something about vision being consistent and we sort of have broken that up into two major phases, the first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to being an experience. What do I mean by that? Essentially, everyone knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon, or Google, or (inaudible) and ultimately, our belief has been that if we do an honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively But bring cloud to the customers rather than having the customers go to a destination, Then they can essentially get maybe 60 or 70 percent of that experience but maybe at a tenth of the price or a tenth of the time. And most human beings as you guys know, is that once you get 60 or 70 percent, You're happy and you move on other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion solves one of clouds biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift, gets in the way, that I've gotta change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've gotta lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do but, like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60 % then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix looking at public cloud as more of a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste amazon outside the more they want amazon inside. And so, so, that's really the first act of the company. A series of products that allow us to build out a full blown IA stack but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one take operations. So, that's the first act. And the second act which is much more a longer term bet for the next decade or so is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to replatform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps and when they redesign their apps Do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud? Or do you want to do it in something that can moves across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. >> John Furrier: So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core business is humming along, solid, but the growth is gonna come from essentials which is the enterprise in multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product officer, you have the keys to the kingdom, it's all on you. >> It's in my guide to work out. >> So you're a team. But this is a big pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about a software company as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software things start to be different so as you start thinking about the act two the convergence of clouds. That really is a key part of it, what you did for the data center, HCI, >> Yeah, totally. >> You're doing HCI for the cloud. >> Yeah, like what does that actually mean? >> So explain that concept. >> No, it's a great question. So, and some of this, obviously, we are struggling through ourselves. But we are not afraid of making mistakes in this transition as you've seen other the last year, we've gone from being in the plans company to a software that runs on third party to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds. All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go but to your point I think, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said "Look I'm gonna release office, "on Mac or Ipad before I even do it on Windows," that kind of thinking has to permeate and pretty much, in my opinion, every technology will end up going forward. A good example of that is look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they built on Nutanix on premise but their idea was look they don't wanna be in the data center business tomorrow without changing the apps they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric because they provide a bunch of other services as well as data centers. So, a recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS not on AWS for a reason is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance only company. >> What does this mean for your customers and your partners because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements, very successfully off the tee, in the middle of the fair way as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend, others taking a different approach, you know that is, owning it all. >> Yeah yeah, in fact I would say that look, in some way, internally we joke about ourselves, as we have to prove the... You know, we always used to think about ourselves as a smart phone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center. But we had to prove that model by owning the full stack like Apple did, but over a period of time, to democratization happens, by distribution. And so in some ways, we have to become more of an android like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and the security of an apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where, We're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspur, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want an experience. And now the lastest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentailly super micro like appliance goodness one click from away upgrades, support, everything. But with a HPE backed platform, that both companies can benefit from. >> You know, one of the big complaints from customers, I hear, on theCUBE, and also privately is there's so many tools, and management software, I've got management plane for this, I got this over here, >> For sure... >> So there's kinda this toolshed mentality of, you know, a new hire, learn this tool for that software, people don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So, how do you see that, how do you address that with going forward, this act two, as you continue to build the products what's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? >> I mean, think it's no different than I think how we sort of launched the company in the first place which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyper-convergence has done, it just we're doing this not just for infrastructure but for clouds because when you use Nutanix you throw away old computer, you throw away old storage, you throw away old (inaudible) I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together ten tools into this magical fabric, I mean it doesn't work that way. But that's hard, because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner is ready to do that they've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey we're on, it's a right of passage for us, we have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. >> So you mentioned Steve Jobs, he also said, when he was alive, in an interview, on the lost interviews on Netflix, I watched that recently. He said, also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies, and change the game, much more significantly then managing a process improvement which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60s, 80% changeover with software. This is part of your strategy, how do you guys see Nutanix in the future, with the software lead or approach, changing the game for IT? >> I think clearly, software is fundamental, I mean the whole point of us, our product was I think, we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere, by the way. It doesn't run in air, it runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but, most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software which is essentially also, when you go back to the Apple thing, because a lot of software renders out that too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than just going to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next 5 years. >> Rebecca Knight: I want to ask you about innovation and your process because here you are, you're the Chief product officer at this very creative company, I wanna know, what sparks you're creativity, where do you get your ideas? Of course you're gonna say, "I talk to customers, "and I find out their problems", but where do you go for inspiration? >> Yeah, I think it's an age old problem I'll give you my personal answer, I don't think it's representative of everyone in the company obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix each of us have their own point of view and things, right? We have this term of "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos". Right? To some extent. That has been done well at other companies like Google, and so forth. So, I've always believed in a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others. More than talk. Whether it's listening to customers, listening to partners, listening to other employees with other ideas and have a curated way to do that because if you only listen to customers you build faster horses not carts, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's the what I would call a generic theme and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from signal from the noise by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen that's the first thing I would say. The second thing which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the... The first one applies to maybe 1% The second one, probably applies to .001% which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth the ability to see around corners and anticipate, you know, my old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton who was the CEO for Citrix, used to always ask this question "Do you know why Michelin has three stars? "The first star is for food, obviously, "there has to be good food. "The second star is for service. "The third star, not many people know why it's for" According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, I haven't really eaten in too many Michelin three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? So to me, that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. Is that second dimension of intuition. More so than even, listening to customers. >> It's seeing around those corners, and knowing which way the winds are blowing. >> Totally. >> One of the other things that we're talking about a lot about, here on theCUBE, particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix...we had Dheeraj on this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down, how would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? >> So I think, we... I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, a couple things that you'll see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder, or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from 0 to ninety, right? And the folks that continuously learn, stay. If they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders. So, continuous learning, if it can be applied, to the generic company becomes an amplifying effect now. People can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things, that otherwise they aren't born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix I think, inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension, which I think, everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, you know those four words sort of capture the, a sense of, the playful, authenticity. But I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And, we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think is easy to say, but very hard to do. >> John Furrier: You learn through your mistakes as they say, learn through failure. So, you mention intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi cloud on premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition, of course we keep on, at the first private cloud reports dominion and team, they got that right. The waves are coming and they look different. There's gonna be more integration we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are gonna come in to the landscape of the tech industry? >> Yeah, I mean I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and have something left over, I will say one thing though, is I think the gain in multi cloud is going to move up the stack, okay? That's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought. Is whose going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because, Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks, some of them are Sass stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest Sass companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. >> How about the Edge? What does the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant, you've got power, you've got connectivity expanding, Wifi 6 around the corner, we've seen that. 5g, okay, I buy it. But as it really starts to figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. What's your intuition tell you? >> Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in, I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but, my intuition tells me, the more things change, the more they'll remain the same, in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smart phone. You know, its got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, talks to services in the back end, I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that make sense. >> John Furrier: Yeah, exactly. Then data, big part of it. Big part of your strategy, the data piece, >> Of course, of course, yeah. I mean I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think in the next 5, 10 years. >> John Furrier: Awesome. What's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees, what's some of the trending conversation? >> I don't know, this conversations pretty interesting! (laughs) >> Of course! >> Rebecca Knight: We agree! (Laughs) >> My intuition is telling me this is a good conversation! Hope it comes out good! >> Keep using that word man. >> I love it! >> Anyway, always great to be with you guys. >> Sunil, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Live from London, England, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. This is The Cube's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. 3,500 people gathered to listen to Sunil Potti. >> Thanks, Stu. >> For the keynote this morning, Sunil's the chief product and development officer with Nutanix. Glad we moved things around, Sunil, 'cause we know events, lots of things move, keynotes sometimes go long, but happy to have you back on the program. >> No, likewise, anytime. >> All right, so, I've been to a few of these and one of the things I hope you walk us through a little bit. So Nutanix, simplicity is always at its core. I have to say, it's taken me two or three times hearing the new, the broad portfolio, the spectrum, and then I've got the core, I've got essentials, I've got enterprise. I think it's starting to sink in for me, but it'll probably take people a little bit of time, so maybe let's start there. >> I mean, I think one of the biggest things that happened with mechanics is that we went from a few products just twelve months ago to over ten products within the span of a year. And both internally as well as externally, while the product values are obviously obvious, so it's more the consumption within our own sales teams, channel teams, as well as our customer base, needed to be codified into something that could be a journey of adoption. So we took it customer inwards, in about a journey that a customer goes through in adopting services in a world of multi-cloud, and before that, before you get to multi-cloud, you have to build a private cloud that is genuine, as we know. And before we do that, we have to re-platform your data center using HCI, so that's really if you work backwards to that, you start with core, which is your HCI platform for modernizing your data center and then you expand to a cloud platform for every workload, and then you can be in a position to actually leverage your multi-cloud services. >> Yeah, and I like that. I mean, start with the customer first, is where you have and I mean the challenge is, you know, every customer is a little bit different. You know, one of the biggest critiques of, you know, you say, okay, what is a private cloud? because they tend to be snowflakes. Every one's a little bit different and we have a little bit of trouble understanding where it is, or did it melt all over the floor. So give us a little bit of insight into that and help us through those stages, the dirty, the crawl-walk-run. >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing everyone has to understand here is that these are not discrete moving parts. Core is obviously your starting point of leveraging computer storage in a software defined way. The way that Amazon launched with EC2 and S3, right. But then, every service that you consume on top of public cloud still leverages computer storage. So in that sense, essentials is a bunch of additional services such as self-service, files, and so forth, but you still need the core to build on essential, to build a private cloud And then from there onwards, you can choose other services, but you're still leveraging the core constructs. So in that sense, I think, both architecturally as well as from a product perspective, as well as architecturally from a packaging perspective, that's why they're synergistic in the way that things have rolled out. >> Okay, so looking at that portfolio. A lot of the customers I work with now, they don't start out in a data center, they've already moved past that, right? So they are leveraging a partner, the public cloud, they might not even be running virtual machines at all anymore. How does that fit into your portfolio? >> Yeah, I mean, increasingly what we are realizing, and you know, we've done this over the last couple of years, is for example, with Calm, you can only use Calm to manage your public clouds without even managing your private cloud of Nutanix. Increasingly with every new service that we're building out, we're doing it so that people don't have to pay the strategy tax off the stack. It needs to be done by a desire of I want to do it versus I need to do it. So, with Frame, you can get going on AWS in any region in an instant or Azure. You don't need to use any Nutanix software. Same thing with Epoch, with Beam. So I think as a company, what we're essentially all about is about saying let us give you a cloud, service-like experience, maybe workload-centric. If it is desktops and so forth. Or if you are going to be at some point reaching a stage where you have to re-platform your data center to look like a public cloud, then we have the core, try and call it platform itself that'll help you get there as well. >> So, looking at re-platforming that data center. If I were to do that now for a customer I wouldn't be looking at virtual machines, storage, networking, I'd be looking at containers or serverless or you know, the new stuff. Again, what is Nutanix's answer to that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what we've found is that there's quite a bit of an option, obviously, of cloud-native ads, but when it comes to mainstream budget allocation, it's still a relative silo in terms of mainstream enterprise consumption. So what we're finding out is that if you could leverage your well-known cloud platform to not create another silo for Kubernetes, don't create another silo for Edge or whatever the new use-cases are, but treat them as an extension of your core platform. At least from a manageability perspective and an operations perspective, then the chances of you adopting or your enterprise adopting these new technologies becomes higher. So, for example, in Calm, we have this pseudonym called Kalm with a K, right. Which essentially allows Kubernetes containers to run natively inside a Calm blueprint, but coexist with your databases inside of EM because that's how we see the next-generation enterprise apps morphing, right. Nobody's going to rewrite my whole app. They're going to maybe start with the web tier and the app tier as containers, but my database tier, my message queue tier, is going to be as VMs. So, how does Calm help you abstract the combination of containers and VMs into a common blueprint is what we believe is the first step towards what we call a hybrid app. And when you get to hybrid apps, is when you can actually then get to eventually all of your time to native cloud apps. >> You know, one of the questions I was hearing from customers is, they were looking for some clarity as to the hybrid environments. You know, the last couple of shows, there was a big presence of Google at the show and while I didn't see Google here on the show floor, I know there was an update from kind of, GCP and AHV. Is Google less strategic now, or is it just taking a while to, you know, incubate? How do you feel about that? >> So the way that you'll see us evolve as we navigate the cloud partnerships is to actually find the sweet spot of product-market fit, with respect to where the product is ready and where the market really wants that. And some of it is going to be us doing, you know, a partnership by intent first and then as we execute, we try to land it with honest products. So, where we started off with Google, as you guys know, is to actually leverage the cloud platform side, core locator with Google data centers and then what we we've evolved to is the fact that our data centers can quote-unquote integrate with their data centers to have a common management interface, a common security interface and all, but we can still run as core-located ones. Where the real integration that has taken some time for us to get to is the fact that, look, in addition to Calm, in addition to GKE kind of things, is rather than run as some kind of power sucking alien on top of some Google hardware, true integration comes with us actually innovating on a stack that lands AH3 natively inside GCP and that's where nested virtualization comes in and we have to take that crawl-walk-run approach there because we didn't want to expose it to public customers what we didn't consume internally. So what we have with the new offering that now is called Test Drive is, essentially that. We've proven that AH3 can run a nested virtualization mode on GCP natively, you can core locate with the rest of GCP services, and we use it currently in our R&D environment for running thousands of nodes for pretty much everyday testing on a daily basis, right. And so, once customer interview expose that now as an environment for our end customers to actually test-drive Nutanix as a fully compatible stack though, on purpose, so you have Prism Central, the full CDP stack and so forth, then as that gets hardened over a period of time, we expose that into production and so forth. >> So there's one category of cloud I haven't heard yet, and that's the service providers. So Nutanix used to be a really good partner for service providers, you know, enabling them to deliver services locally to local geography, stuff like that, so what's the sense of Nutanix regarding these service providers currently? >> Yeah, I think that frankly, that's probably a 2019 material change to our roadmap. It's your, the analogy that I have is that when we first launched our operating system, we fist had to do it with an opinionated stack using Supermicro. Most importantly, from an end-customer perspective, they got a single throat to choke, but also equally importantly, it kept the engineering team honest because we knew what it means to do one pick-up page for the full stack. Similarly, when we launched Xi, we needed to make sure we knew what SREs do, right. That scale, and so that's why we started with our version of SMC on, you know, as you guys know with Additional Reality as well as partners like Xterra. But very soon you're going to see is, once we have cleared that opinionated stack, software-wise we're able to leverage it, just like we went from Supermicro to Dell and Lenovo and seven other partners, you're going to see us create a Xi partner network. Which essentially allows us to federate Xi as an OS into the service providers. And that's more a 2019 plus timeframe. >> Yeah, speaking along those lines, the keynote this morning, Karbon with a k talked about Kubernetti's. Talk about that, that's the substrate for Nutanix's push toward cloud natives, so-- >> Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to hear that in the day two keynote as well, is basically, customer's want, as I said, an operating system for containers that is based on well-known APIs like Kube Cattle from Kubernetes and all that, but at the same time, it is curated to support all of the enterprise services such as volumes, storage, security policies from Flow, and you know, the operational policies of containers shouldn't be any different from Vms. So think about it as the developers still a Kubernetes-like interface, they can still port their containers from Neutanix to any other environment, but from an IT ops side, it looks like Kubernetes, containers, and VMs are co-residing as a first-class option. >> Yeah, I feel like there had been a misperception about what Kubernetes is and how it fits, you know. My take has been, it's part of the platform so there's not going to be a battle for a distribution of Kubernetes because I'm going to choose a platform and it should have Kubernetes and it should be compatible with other Kubernetes out there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's going to be like a feature of Linux. See, in that sense, there's lots of Linux distros but the core capabilities of Linux are the same, right. So in that sense, Kubernetes is going to become a feature of Linux, or the cloud operating system, so that those least-common denominator features are going to be there in every cloud OS. >> Alright, so Kubernetes not differentiating just expand the platform >> Enabling >> Enabling peace. So, tell us what is differentiating today? You know, what are the areas where Nutanix stands alone as different from some of the other platform providers of today? >> I think that, I mean obviously, whatever we do, we are trying to do it thoughtfully from the operational, you know, simplicity as a first-class citizen. Like how many new screens do we add when we use new features? A simple example of that is when we did micro-segmentation. The part was to make sure you could go from choosing ten VMs to grouping them and putting a policy as soon as possible as little friction of adopting a new product. So, we didn't have to "virtualize" the network, you didn't need to have VX LANs to actually micro-segment, just like in public cloud, right. So I think we're taking the same thing into services up the stack. A good one to talk about is Error. Which is essentially looking at databases as the next complex beast of operational complexity, besides. Especially, Oracle Rack. And it's easier to manage postcrest and so forth, but what if you could simplify not just the open source management, but also the database side of it? So I would say that Error would be a good example of a strategic value proposition or what does it mean to create a one plus one equals three value proposition to database administrators? Just like we did that for VIR vetted administrators, we're now going after DBS. >> Alright, well, Sunil thank you so much. Wish we had another hour to go through it, but give you the final word, as people leave London this year, you know, what should they be taking away when they think about Nutanix? >> I think the platform continues to evolve, but the key takeaway is that it's a platform company. Not a product company. And with that comes the burden, as well as the promise of being an iconic company for the next, hopefully, decade or so. All right, thanks a lot. >> Well, it's been a pleasure to watch the continued progress, always a pleasure to chat. >> Thank you >> All right, for you Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Nutanix's .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)

(digital chime) (camera shutter) (bright pop music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, live in New Orleans, Louisiana, I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, marching band, you know, floats coming in, Mardi Gras atmosphere, and a slew of new products and updates. Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer at Nutanix. Sunil, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, likewise Stu, anytime. >> Alright, so a lot that you covered in, so let's get into it, start with, you know, some of the broad company updates. We've been talking about this journey for making everything invisible. I'm waiting, the next time you're going to have the invisible man. Is a... no, no, no, you're putting the IT person forward. >> Yeah, you know we talk about that continuum between all the way from mainframes to like, whatever, HCI to now we've got cloud instance, hyper-converge, then cloud, and then there's functions. Then eventually we'll have NaaS, which is nothing as a service. Right, something like that, but I mean our journey I think of invisible infrastructure started off at hyper-convergence, so computing storage, and essentially it's just increased layers of convergence is how we see it, so if you can converge the networking stack, we converge the automation aspects, then we go in invisible data centers, and then eventually if you hyper-converge the cloud, CapEx and OpEx, public cloud, private clouds, distributed clouds, then you get an invisible cloud. So it's essentially, I think that's really how we've sort of professed this conference is invisible infrastructure evolving to invisible data centers to evolving to invisible clouds. >> You know, so Sunill, one of the things, if we've been talking to your customers, the question is, "Who is the Nutanix customer?" So, when we talked about kind of HCI, even before it was HCI, let's get ourselves out of the silos, you were working with the administrators and the architects. You've built some of these things, you know, you've got a new SaaS offering, you've got micro-segmentation. You're touching more of the business, and sometimes going up the stack too. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Who do you see as the primary customers? >> Yeah, I mean, I think for us, you know, if we just stayed as a broad HCI platform play, then we would probably be slowly making up our way of, between the server guys and the storage guys and maybe the director of infrastructure and so forth. And a lot of it has been groundswell movement for Nutanix over the last six, seven years, right? But, you know, this is what I talk about it to our customers, like when you actually go to cloud on AWS or GCP, there is no storage admin, there is no server admin, there's no one. There's only a cloud architect, and so I think that's what we've seen over the last few years is this evolution to this one single org called the cloud org within enterprises, and then you heard me say this before about this, you know eventually as we move up, our value up the stack, as we go from invisible infrastructure to clouds, our relevancy is also growing to the CIO, because the CIO can now be the CAO, which is the Chief Amazon Officer, or the Chief Alphabet, or the Chief Azure Officer, essentially the Chief Cloud Officer, where we can help them blur the lines between AWS inside, which is Nutanix, and then AWS outside. >> Yeah, I love that, because when we talk to customers, it's not "I'm building out "my multicloud, hybrid cloud, composite," whatever you want to call it, it's "We're "figuring out our digital transformation, "and we've got applications, we've got stuff we're SaaSifying, "there's cool things I've built, you know, "in the public cloud, and I've got, you know, "my data center and the transformation that "I'm going through there." So, the question I have for you is, what is Nutanix's position in the cloud? I didn't hear you going up on stage saying you're going to put five to 10 billion dollars a year into building out data centers and availability zones, and all those things there. Sometimes people misconstrue some of the journey and things like Zy, and they're like, "Oh, it rhymes with what Amazon's doing," or even many times, you know, similar services to an Amazon there, but partnerships with the public cloud providers, and you know, please help us set the record straight, that you're not standing up a public cloud. >> Yeah, I think look, we think increasingly the world, of the world of clouds is a dispersed world, right? I mean, you had to say that we think this construct called the core cloud, which is essentially both, you know, a private version and a public version that's harmonized together into this one enterprise core cloud, but then increasingly we are seeing cloud-like architecture in a remote office branch office or in a retail store, so we call that the distributed cloud, and then it's also with IOT especially, it's getting extended all the way to the edge, whether it be a one-node Nutanix deployment talking to a data center of clusters talking to GCP for machine learning. So we think that the world of clouds is going to emerge as the de facto standard, and public cloud just happens to be a big percentage of that. Private cloud will also be a decent percentage of that. So will these other clouds, so what we need is, I guess, one OS to bind them all, right? And that's the end goal for what we're embarking on, so one of the things that we've recognized is that one of different kinds of clouds is an extended enterprise cloud, where instead of having two primary data centers and two secondary data centers, and then having five cloud availability zones, why even be in the secondary business? What if the secondary data centers were subsumed into a cloud as a service, but you retained the same operational tooling as your primary data center? And that's really where Zy's footprint comes in is, it's to augment what a customer is going through's journey of private cloud or public cloud to this distributed cloud environment, that there will be some news cases that need to be fulfilled using the same cloud architecture. >> So Sunil, let's talk about the customer journey alongside Nutanix's journey. You guys are walking, term I heard a lot so far in the conference is, Nutanix is our partner, our partner in this journey in digital transformation. However, the customer today is very much infrastructure customers. You guys talk to developers, internal customers of your customers. What has been that story, and what has been that conversation? What have, what have you guys learned, and what have you taught your customers along the way? >> I mean I think it's, look we generally know, as I've mentioned on stage today, that we're in another decades worth of journey, as we go from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. That's not going to happen in six six months or so, but what we're finding is that, in the last, I would say four to five years, the view of what cloud can be used for, the "why" of cloud has changed. Initially, there used to be, "Oh, I need to get past IT," by developers, then it eventually became, "Oh, no, no, no, I need to use it as a way to, you know, to deliver a better IT." Now it's being used as a way to actually drive my business. And that's why we use the word digital transformation, just because it's a direct connotation to driving the top line, right? So, when you look at our customers and the journey that we're on, we also want to set expectations of what we are versus what we are not, right? So we're not about enabling the applications to be built, in the sense that, you know, we're not application software companies, but at the end of the day though, if we can abstract out all the, if I can call it, issues below an app and allow IT or the business to focus on a new org that we're calling, you know, the CIO and the CTO merged to be the CDO, right, the Chief Digital Officer, that becomes one org, and that's what we're seeing with many of our large customers is, many of our customers are, their orgs, either they were in the CIO organization, or the infrastructure organization, or the cloud organization, they're all now being merged into the CDO org, and the goal then becomes for it to power a digital transformation through various apps, but with our, essentially leveraging infrastructure as a boat anchor, right? It's more of an accelerator at that point. >> So, there's debate on where that ends, like you know, we can talk about with edge computing, like where does edge start and the core begin. The same thing with infrastructure. You guys made a really interesting announcement around your capability with databases today and being able to, I don't even know the term but, to put a prism-like experience to databases. Talk about those areas around what we've considered traditionally infrastructure, storage network compute, going to this middleware layer, where do you think you can help customers simplify their journey? >> I mean, I think just to recap, some of the ways that we've, you know, approached this year is, look we think about it as three layers of the cloud stack, which is we had computer storage virtualization and we sort of completed the IA stack with our Flow product, which delivers one-click secure networks. And then for the first time, even though our stack is good for running third-party workloads, just like the public cloud runs a lot of PaaS services, increasingly in enterprises, customers are asking for an opinionated view of a PaaS service. So we do have third-party partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks, a whole bunch of other third-party providers, but the core database workload, especially with Oracle being such a complex beast, but it's mainstream, the customer has said, "Look, "can you provide a one plus one "equals three kind of solution "for the world of database?" And that's what Nutanix Era is, and that sort of becomes sort of cornerstone of our first PaaS service, where we're trying to simplify database operations, including things like Oracle RAC, and that's what we demonstrated was to actually provision Oracle RAC in minutes, make clones, create dev instances, and democratize databases for the rest of developers using APIs. So that's the sort of evolution of the stack for us with Nutanix Era, and then we didn't stop there. We also sort of innovated with our first Nutanix SaaS service, with this product called Beam with the acquisition of Minjar, which essentially says, look multi-cloud needs to start with stability, and then obviously you enable control and then you add operational automation, and then visibility and so forth, right? So, with Beam there, it's sort of, sort of sets the stage for the fact that we can now add more to the multi-cloud portfolio. >> Sinil, Beam's an interesting one. Your first SaaS offering. Keith and I were talking before this. There are lots of companies out there that are trying to tackle this challenge. >> Sunil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> With that have, you know, every single platform company out there is trying to tackle this, and then there's lot of independents. There's a lot that goes into, you know, maintaining, advising, you know, the whole consultancy world has spent decades doing this. How do you balance product development efforts there versus, you know, your core platform? You know, should this be an indication that you're going to build out a SaaS portfolio in the future? >> Got it, got it, got it. I know, that's a great question. So, so I think, just to take a step back, Minjar was an interesting company, because Netsil, the other acquisition, is also a bought in the cloud SaaS service that will integrate for hybrid, you know, visibility and networking, but also stand-alone application operations. But Minjar had this interesting history where it was originally a high-end advisory service for AWS. >> Stu: Right. >> It was in the top-five service partners for AWS, and they actually had dozens of customers that they still operate and manage and provide, you know, get a lot of learnings from helping customers, sort of, they are like the Navy SEALS of AWS and so forth, right? And when they built this product, which is now called as Beam, what we think about it is that, look that particular capability is a feature of a platform. It's not a stand-alone product category. What people are going to be looking forward to is a multi-cloud operational fabric, that has an app store and a marketplace, where I can go in and consume services, whether it be on prem or off prem, have a single pane of glass for visibility, again on prem or off prem, and then do one-click automation or orchestration, right? And so the fact that this single pane of glass has to cut over on prem as well as public cloud is the reason why we believe Nutanix has a play here to kind of make it a core feature, because we at least own one pillar of it, which is the on-prem stack, and to the extent that we can do an honest job of extending it to a deep job on AWS and DCP and others, then I think there's value added. >> How do you get closer to the application? When I look at this space, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft have all been talking some similar messages on this, and that, the cloud strategies that they've gone through have that operational model, and you know, they own these applications, so you know, why Nutanix? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's another interesting question. So look, I think the world of apps, and I would say that power shift is happening obviously. We know that with IBM, but even with Oracle, as a mainstream enterprise app, if you really look at, say a public cloud conference, especially AWS's conference, if anything, the only vendor that they take potshots at is Oracle, because they see it as long-hanging fruit in the enterprise from a complexity side, right? And I think with the advent of cloud, the first time the customers have seen a real alternative to move away from this SQL engine on Oracle to potential Postgres or other alternatives. But to do that, you need abstractions. I need to be able to simplify my current environment of Oracle. At the same time, do it in a way that I can actually harmonize the API so that, oh, at some point, can I actually create another instance, but it's on Postgres, right? And the more I can provide that abstracted APIs, the more, you know, flexibility that's there for the customers to actually move from this legacy apps to the next generation apps. So I think, I guess the simple answer to your question is, look for us, even if you're not in the app business, if anything it's an asset than a liability, because then we can be completely neutral to the transformation from the old to the new. We have no skin in the game of keeping you in the old architecture, so if a customer says, "Look, I need to manage "my old, but I need an accelerated "way to get to the new cloud-native apps," then we are all for it. >> So Sinil, one of the, I think I would call this one of the first principles of Nutanix is this ideal of want-quick provisioning, the ability to simplify really complex, really hard things. You guys did it with HCI. The database management piece is another example. You're talking about it now, with ACS and the cloud. Let's talk about the, what happens when you zig when you should have zagged. In the case of going with Docker, the leading solution at the time, >> Sure, sure. >> Seemed like the right approach to go, now you guys are zagging. What makes Nutanix capable of making such a quick change and providing the consistent layer, like as customers go along with you on this journey, 6they count on APIs, they count on integrations, they count on just to, that basic capability and that it's stable. What gives customers the comfort level, that you know what, the complex stuff, Nutanix will take care of, if there needs to be a course correction from a culture and development platform perspective, they can right the ship? >> Yeah, no I think to your first question there Keith, I think, look, in this era now, it doesn't matter which business you're in, the time to succeed obviously is accelerated, but the time to fail is also accelerated, right? We just have to internalize that in our DNA. I would say of any high-growth company is to just be honest about failing fast. And I, yeah I mean I think Docker was a thing a year and a half ago, and we were early to market, and in fact, I would say it was our ACs and a couple of guys in Europe who actually recognized that, look why are we focusing on all this, when every customer that I talk to is testing out Kubernetes. And sure, we were sitting in Silicon Valley and Kubernetes was just coming up and so forth, and so I think it's two things, one their internalization that look, we have to fail fast in a high-growth business like ours. And then two, having the sensors that give us indications of, are we in the right course or not is also important. And so, the other thing that I would say that has worked well with this company than my prior companies is the fact that it, while it is hierarchical for scale, it is one inch to end from a communications perspective. Things like Slack, things like the communication mechanism, allow us to have that real-time touch with the front guys that focus on the customers and so forth. So, so for example, once the clarity was there around ACS to kind of zag on Kubernetes, the whole system was able to lean in, because the "why" of doing that was clear. The "what" and the "how" follow, right? I mean that's really what, how we will keep it going. >> Alright Sunil, before we let you you go, I want to bring back to the infrastructure side. You've had a few of the solutions that are growing really fast. I know you've highlighted the AFS, the Acropolis File Services. I've got the new object service that just got announced. At core platform, what are the areas that are catching wildfire for your customers? >> That's a great question, so on the core platform, which is still our bread and butter to some extent, our core focus has been about it becoming like the OS for the enterprise, period, right? And there's no workloads left as an island. And right now if I can, you know, three years ago we were talking about workloads that we're good for. Nowadays, I talk about workloads that we're not good for. So if I'm a scale-up database that requires certification, I can tell you about some of those that we are short of getting certified, but once that happens, there should be no workload that we're not good far. And that's where AFS comes in, that's where object services come in is, these are all requirements in the core OS that are needed to solve for those kinds of workloads. And, one thing though, to Keith's earlier point, that we have tried to keep honest, and that's why some of these take longer to come out, is that they still have to hold the bar of instant upgrades. Start small, start quickly, pay as you grow. They all have to follow the same ground rules, right? And that is what is keeping us honest frankly, in the overall desire. >> Okay, want to give you the final word, as Keith said, your customers consider Nutanix a partner. As they leave Nutanix .NEXT 2018, how should they be considering Nutanix? >> Yeah, no I think leaving Nutanix, they should recognize us as a company that obviously needs to be hungry, that needs to have a bold vision. We, you know, in our core values, we will make mistakes, we are vulnerable. But we are, you know, hopefully transparent about it, so that that's the, at the end of the day, the core essence of a partnership is that level of transparency between two people, right? And that's what we are hoping that customers will take away from the conference. >> Alright, well Sunil, it's always been a pleasure to document everything going at, since the inaugural .NEXT back in Miami, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next show, where we'll make sure to pin you on, you know, how we've gone first. >> Sounds good. >> Sunil Potti and Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(Latin music) >> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the Cube, covering Blockchain Unbound, brought to you by Blockchain Industries. >> Hello, everyone and welcome back to our special, exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. I'm John Furrier, your host of the Cube. We're here getting all the action, extracting the signal from the noise. Our next guest is Sunil Verma, who's the partner of Team in Residence venture capital firm doing traditional VC as well as investing in token economics, blockchain, and decentralized applications. Sunil, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> So I got to get your perspective because you guys have done a lot of high profile deals on the venture side, Slack, Instacart and a slew of others, great portfolio. But you guys also got your eye on the prize on token economics. So explain the strategy of the investment thesis. Is it still venture, all in on token, mix, what's the makeup of the firm, what are you guys doing? >> Yeah, for sure. It's definitely a combination of both. We really feel there's opportunity in the decentralized world and we're really looking at sort of the white spaces there. So what is the LinkedIn of Blockchain look like? What does the Amazon of Blockchain look like? So those are the things we're trying to solve for. But at the same time we're really looking at companies that have the governance and the accountability, and transparency that Blockchain really locks in. That's really what we're investing in. So if there's a token or tokenomic that we really appreciate and we really understand, we'll be participating. >> That's good stuff, I want to ask you kind of the question and it's the classic Silicon Valley metaphor, but I want to put it in context of the venture architecture. How do you architect a venture in this new world? So the minimum viable product, or MVP, minimum viable, MVV, minimum viable venture architecture. What do you look for? Because you mentioned government, governance, we hear consensus, we hear transparency, we hear open source. We're seeing a new venture architecture emerging, it's not your grandfather's classic VC deal, which is team, team, team, patented technology, things are running much faster, running hotter, it's a moving train of technology, the plumbing level, but the business models as you mention are pretty clear, on some of them. What is the minimum viable architecture of a venture look like? >> Yeah, that's a really good question. I think when we were, what we're looking at is not your traditional venture companies, I think team, technology, the financials, product/market fit, all those things still apply in a big way here, and really what we're banking, what we're kind of looking at is how responsible is the team itself? I think over the last sort of 12 months, we've seen folks go out raise really big amounts of capital with no product road map, no business road map, no real way to get from zero to X, and now really what we're focusing on is is there a product that's already been built, do they really understand tokenomics, are they trying to shoehorn a regular business onto the blockchain and just assume that by adding Crypto at the end of toilet paper, they're going to get something? I think that's stuff that we have our red flags up on. >> I want to get your reaction to a comment I made earlier on the Cube, but also on this event. There's three types of profile types that we see, I want to get your reaction to this. One, the startup, we have an idea, it's going to be blockchain enabled, good vision, white paper, check. Maybe some VC might want them, but it's more token. And then the other end of the spectrum, I call the oh, shit, we're going out of business. I call that a pivot. They throw the hail Mary. Then the middle one is the growth company that's growing with token economics, all the elements are in place for a real go to market. What's your reaction to that? Do you see that's something similar and how do you identify each one and the role that you might play as an investor in that? >> No, for sure, I think that when we come at it, we're looking at it from a full stack experience so does the company need resources on blockchain developers, does the company need product and marketing support, do they need PD support? And once you've actually gone live, one of the things we're starting to realize now is you have to really approach this from both a PR standpoint as well as a hire standpoint. And you will have to sort of divorce what the company and what the employees are thinking about and what the investors really want. It's really about, and for a lot of the protocols out there, it's really about the next sort of 15 to 24 months and really getting the exposure that they need. From the early stages it is about the white paper, it is about the technology, it is about making sure you're thinking about it in the right way. >> So you just got to be cognizant what you're saying, if it's early stage, they got to have self-awareness to know that they got some work to do to build it out. >> Sunil: Yup, exactly. >> And then where's the growth elements? >> Sunil: Yeah, exactly. >> All right so I want to get your reaction to the ulity token versus the security token. Obviously a lot of people say, hey, I've got a utility token, and then basically raise money without a product, that's essentially, there's no utility yet, there's no product and people are trying to shortcut that, which is really not an optimized experience, because you've rushed the product to market, in some cases it takes a year to get there, so essentially that CC is kind of signaled against that. So, as an investor, how do you decide what's the best avenue, security token, or utility token, and why in each case would you go for either one? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think it comes down to where they actually domiciled, where they being, and where are the customer base, right. In all honesty, the center of gravity for blockchain has shifted away from Silicon Valley. It's not Silicon Valley, itself. It definitely is around the Asian marketplace. When we look at the SEC and some of the stuff that they're kind of saying, that's great, no problem, I think we definitely need those checks and balances in place, we're investing in security tokens, that's not a problem for us, that's something that we do all day long. >> John: It's a process you know. >> Yeah, it's a process we understand, exactly. >> Credit investor, reg D, form D. >> We do KYC all day long. The thing is on the utility side, it's like, is there a utility that's broad enough that really is going to affect a billion plus people that we're actually interested in? And to your earlier point, they do have to have a product ready to go. So we're working with folks like Orchid, who have been working on their product for over a year plus. They've actually waited to do the token offering and what not, so those kinds of things, which is decentralized, those kinds of things are the ones that are really exciting to us. >> So what about the dynamic where a company might want to do a security token, raise some cash, and also have a utility token for either consensus or other things and can a company coexist with two ice deals at the same time. Have you seen that? >> You know that's a really good question. I would point you to a lot of the smaller public companies that are on the Nasdaq that are just adding Crypto to their product offering and you know seeing huge spikes. They have to manage both the public investors, and they also have to manage the token offerings, and token investors that they're doing now. I think it's, there are definitely ways to do it but at the end of the day is the team structured correctly to manage it and are we going to see a convergence of the pricing. You're not really going to get the same premium you will in the token markets as you will as on the public markets. >> Quick question on security token, what are you looking for for pledged against the security? Are you okay with future revenues, is it equity, what's your preferred, do you care, is there a preference? >> No, it definitely it's some equity in the company, I think, you know depending on the stage of the company, and the security token type that they're doing, it's equity, might be future revenue sometimes it's dividends or the opportunity to get dividends, so it's a combination of a lot of things. >> Do you have a preference, you care? >> At the end of the day, equity is always preferable. >> Okay, what are you looking at here, what deals have you seen here? Did you do any deals here? >> Yeah, we do, we have a couple, one is called, Creator.AI, they are a decentralized contact creation platform. One is iCash, which is one of the security tokens that's actually kind of out there. Another is Renovo Financial, they're actually doing a JCO, Jobs from the Jobs Act, a token offering based on that, they're actually going to be announcing some really big stuff that is coming up in the next week or so. >> I'm interest to talk about, let's talk about the Jobs Act and how instrumental that was, how that's changed the game on NGO's and mission-driven investing, which we've been covering a lot in DC. Sunil, we'd love to have you come down to our studio in Palo Alto, and talk more. Great to have you, thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Team in Residence, doing a lot of hot deals on the front end of investing. You get nervous at all, you worried about things these days, what's your mindset like, I mean, it's like white water rafting, you're in the middle of the action, what's it like? >> Oh, for sure, it's exciting, it's fast-paced. I think with the hair cut over the last few days, everyone's sort of rubbing their heads right now, but at the end of the day you have to have the stomach for it, and I think you have to be as educated as you can. >> And look for new liquidity ways. This is the key thing, new liquidities out there. >> I think we're seeing a lot of new liquidity. I think Telegram is a really good example of that. I think folks that didn't want to participate in round one are now getting sort of slugs of time tokens that are out there and they're buying it at a premium and it's all happening in the secondary market. >> That's awesome, with new infrastructure, new dynamics, new reimagining wealth, creation value caps, restore, harnessing that value is changing liquidity, changing the structure of entrepreneurship. Thanks so much, Sunil Verma, thanks for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, more live action coming here in Puerto Rico, the Cube, be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for our CUBE Conversation, taking a little break from the shows as we get ready, actually, for the winter break which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is different, exciting. It's a little bit more intimate. We're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sunil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of Nuage Networks which is part of Nokia, a CUBE alumni. I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. >> That's right. >> Jeff: So, great to see you. >> Good to see you again. >> Absolutely, so, been a little more than a year. >> Sunil: That's right. >> So, what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? >> Sure, it's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with the momentum that we have garnered in the industry: more adoption of our solution, more validation, more events, more customers. >> Jeff: (chuckling) >> Which is great, that's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, Exponential-e, they're all adopted and launched with our SDN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud whether it's Fujitsu or whether it's an NTD Data like China Mobile. And of course, you know we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies, for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them security software to find security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So, that continues, and of course it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won award at MEF on the best SDN solution recently. We won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, IHS Markit, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two as the inventors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. >> Right, because automation in networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack, right, in the automation. So, what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? >> Right, so if you remember when we talked, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And we were doing software-defined networking but in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers to the public cloud across the wide area and to the enterprise branches. What that means is you're not providing a siloed automation, but we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. >> Right, right, you had a great quote. I picked it up in doing some research. You know, the metaproblem is you said, "Connect users everywhere to applications everywhere," a really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. >> Sunil: You got it. >> A lot of complexity behind that statement. >> That's right, that's right, incredible amount of complexity, but it's important to construct the metaproblem, look at what it is that enterprises have pain with. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere, and they want to connect to applications anywhere whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely, in a self-service manner, but they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what you have is you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield, because there is nothing like just greenfields. >> Right. >> And we are to do it in their private data centers. You've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data centers and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. >> Right, right, and then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access, and oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. >> Indeed, and you know, the wall is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly wherever you are. >> Right. >> And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so, it's all about consumerization of IT on how do you make IT that agile, how do you actually modernize IT. Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry: software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So, we like and our customers love that we've thought the problem end-to-end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. >> So, I'm curious to get your perspective cause you've been doing this for awhile. >> Sunil: Yes. >> As the security landscape has changed. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Everyone is getting, we get reports every day, we're numb to it now. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked. >> Sunil: That's right. >> And Equifax got hacked, so everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about the big wall anymore. There's no such thing as the big wall. >> Sunil: That's right. >> The wall's about crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just kids having fun in the basement. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to the modern security stance that you have to have? >> Look every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's top of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment, to a higher edge automated environment but make it more secure than what we have. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And as you noted, the attack surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So, the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is, and that's in response to the fact that, as you noted again, that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is, while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end-to-end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other but not users to the applications. So, that is very important for our customers to know that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really help them understand who's talking to who at application level, and being able to then have that domain-wide view and be able to very quickly respond to CERT alerts. So, because today, when a CERT alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now, because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain-wide view, and you're able to do microsegmentation end-to-end, you are able to push a button and be as course or as granular but be very surgical and take action very quickly. >> Alright, so, hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017 which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for awhile. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? >> Right, and what we are noticing is we're going from beachheads to mainstream. So, we are getting deployed. The solid deployments is not only as I noted in data centers, in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super-important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We continue to do that, not only for what we call the virtualized security services solution that we have and not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized services, cloud services. We're going to cover the gamut and that's what we're after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. >> Alright, well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again. And we look forward to watching the progress. >> Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> It's a pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Reinvent 2017, presented by AWS, intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas. We're at AWS Reinvent. Day one coverage of three days of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, the host this week. >> We've got two sets, our fifth year covering Reinvent. It's been great to watch. Every year we try to get in the VC panels. We just had Jerry Chen on from Greylock. We've got two more awesome friends of theCUBE in the community here. We've got Sunil Dhaliwal who is the founder of Amplify Ventures and Nick Sturiale with Ignition Partners. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> Good to see you, John. >> Boy what a lineup it's been over the past three years, four years with Amazon, just watching them tear. Now it's all steamed ahead. Microsoft is totally gearing up. You can see them playing, what they're doing, they're pedaling as fast as they can. Google Play and the (mumbles) we're gonna compete on TensorFlow and other, little goodness, a lot more to go. You got Alibaba Cloud. Intel behind us is making (mumbles) chips. Good market on paper. >> Yeah. >> But we're seeing startups kind of get bought, not for what they wanted. Didn't go public. Skyhigh from Greylock. You see Barracuda going private. A lot of money to be made. Maybe the investment thesis of 200 million dollar fundings, that's over, is it over? Get a little bit of cash and get the critical mass and... >> Well, here's a question. Do you invest in these companies thinking every one of them is going to go public? Or do you think that a good number of them are gonna get acquired? And I think the investors that have done this for a while, and Nick's done this for what, like 45 years? >> I started when I was two, so. >> I've done this like two years less than you have, so I don't pretend I'm dramatically younger. But the reality is, these companies get acquired. And pretending that you're gonna pile into a company late and expect every single thing to go public I think is kind of crazy. And the people that are getting caught in that trap, I think they're gonna be in for a rude awakening. But look, you've got a billion six outcome for Barracuda, right? >> John: That was pretty damn good. >> And you know Skyhigh number hasn't been printed, but it wasn't a small one. Like, those are good outcomes. Those are good venture returns, if you were smart about where you got in. >> So I have a slightly different perspective, which is the real issue is that so much money moved into the late stage, and these companies thought that growth would always be linear even asymptotic. And so what happens is that their growth rate slows down and the cost of growth goes up, and suddenly the company's not quite as hot as it was a year ago, and so now the options for what they do have shrunk dramatically, and so you get exits like you just mentioned. And so part of the problem is is that entrepreneurs and investors really have to have a sober view of what is a business model that's durable over time and which ones really are gonna start to leak in their later phases. >> Well it's kind of a planted question for you guys, because you're early stage in Amplify. I've been following you guys, do a great job. You guys do a range of early, end growth. >> Mostly early though. >> The days of just laying back and kicking your feet up and throwing cash at stuff is over. You actually gotta do the work. It sounds like old school VCs. Greg Sands and I talk about this all the time. You gotta go in and be venturing. You gotta actually make it work. >> And that sucks, I was just told I put my feet up, I put some money in and then I get a distribution check at the end of it. >> That's what everyone thinks you guys do. What do you guys do every day? Take us through your day. >> It looks a lot like that except... >> It's so easy to be a VC, all you do is okay, yes, no, okay that's good. >> We got a dartboard. >> All you gotta do is bet on the good ones. >> Yeah. >> That's so easy. >> So there are what, 14,000 startups in the bay area, how many of them are worthwhile you think? >> It's a lot of work. Well old school, let's go back to the old school tactics, because you're seeing a couple things going on. You guys essentially pointing it out, you gotta do the work and pick the winners. But now that the business models are changing, right? You're seeing Amazon just ignoring conventional wisdom, and they're winning. The game is changing a bit in the business model side. How are you guys looking at that as you make investments? So you got the classic venture, bet on a good team, do all that stuff. What do you guys look at now in the marketplace for fit, scale, longevity, durability? >> I mean the stuff we care about the most is are you going after a big problem? Because I think a lot of the stuff we see, even with your great teams and great technologies, but you step back and you actually think, you know, that isn't a company, that's a product, or that's not even a product, that's a feature. And I think that's the natural outgrowth of what happens when you got 14,000 startups in the bay area, is there aren't 14,000 products that are companies worth having. What you have is, probably 12,000 features, 1500 products, and then like 500 real companies. And that's probably the biggest filter that you gotta apply on the way in, and it's maybe the hardest one to solve for, which is, roll this out seven years, nine years, because that's really what you're talking about when you're talking about building a public durable company is, what does this market look like way down the road? And is that a thing that can stand alone? And that's really, I think, the difference between the companies and the investors that do really well and the ones that can kind of squeeze by, knocking out a couple interesting outcomes. >> My favorite thing is that when you say we just pick the winners, is that nobody knows who the winner is a priori. If you knew that, that market would be gone already. And most successful companies that you read about, and they talk about the (mumbles) investors that were in it early, that's all BS. It's a million good things happen along the way, serendipity, a ton of hard work on the management team and the employees. So this idea that things are preordained is just silly. And I would tell you that you look at most really successful companies today, their business model is completely different than the one that the venture person backed. >> I mean it's always the classic, because I remember when I first started an entrepreneur in the 90s, the question was what's your exit strategy? It was a legitimate question at that time, and it was kind of a peg mark, okay, when I build a growing company and have an exit. Now the exits are, as you mentioned, buyers. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If Microsoft's in a race to fill in their white spaces, man, I would crop up and get the crops growing, right? So you can say, okay, Microsoft. So you guys gotta kind of do a little bit of homework there, do some relationship work, and you guys are close to Microsoft, so. >> Yes. >> I mean, is that kind of the new playbook? >> Yes. >> How should entrepreneurs posture to this? I mean obviously they're gonna try to build a durable venture, but they don't want to be zig-zagging too much or pivoting. >> No. >> I mean Nick made the point earlier, which I think is absolutely the one to focus on, which is when you raise a ton of capital your options start to shrink. The more money you raise at the higher and higher price, there's somebody you gotta serve who's thinking about the even bigger pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And honestly, when we look at, I'll take one company in our portfolio for example, and I think the Splunk story is right up there with it, If you look at Datadog, Datadog's huge here at this show. There's purple shirts everywhere and a massive booth, and they've been here for five years running or four years running. That business has barely touched the last round of capital they raised, let alone the round of capital before that. The capital efficiency of that business, not only is it gonna make it a great outcome, but it's gonna give them tons of options of things that they can do. And, you know, they'll get to make every single decision they make, whether it's going to new product or whatever, position of strength. And not a lot of companies do that. >> So Splunk started in 2004. Guess how much total the company raised before it went public? >> How much? >> Forty million. Guess how much it spent up to the time it went public? >> John: How much? >> John: Twenty five. >> So it went public... >> So very capital efficient? >> John: Think about that. >> Yes, and it's worth 9 billion now. So you had several hundred millionaires created out of Splunk, and I would submit to you if Splunk was started today, the investor community would have killed it. >> John: Why? >> Because 18 Brinks trucks would have backed up and dumped a billion dollars on top of it, and buried it in too much money without allowing the company to get the time to become a fully viable system. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> So the too much cash can create toxicity for the startup? >> Money rarely makes the company. Money rarely makes the company. >> Lew Cirne was on earlier, founder of New Relic. Another capital efficient company. >> Great company. >> Went public all time high. Love that guy. He's such a strong, he wrote some code last week. He said, if you can help your partners be successful, in referring to Amazon. >> Man: Amazon. >> Then you can be a great ecosystem partner. So the question now is that's not a bad deal for a company to jump into the Cloud game and be a really good partner and build a kick-ass product. >> Yes. >> And look like a feature maybe on paper, and then sequence to an opportunity. Thoughts on that? It's certainly lucrative if you can get the flywheel going. Right? >> So you don't want to build a company whose basic thesis is helping Amazon or Azure or Google. That is a dead company. If, however, you pull revenue for one of those three in a way that's interesting to them, they will support you all day long. We have two companies in particular, Icertis and KenSci that are pulling a lot of revenue for Azure right now. And Microsoft gives them extraordinary support. >> That's the nuance right there. That's the nuance. Pulling revenue, value, creation. >> Yes. >> Well, they've created Amazon and Microsoft and Google, to a degree, as they get going. They've created a really interesting model, which is unlike your traditional ecosystem, hub-and-spoke model, where someone's gonna capture (mumbles) control of the sale, etc., etc. The smart thing that Amazon's done is they say, you use whatever you want, we're gonna bill you for the primitives until the cows come home, and as long as you're not standing in between Amazon and their primitives revenue, you're gonna do great. >> All right, final question for you guys. First of all, great conversation on the capital markets, certainly it's crazy. We always try to cover it, but here's a thought exercise. Last night we were at the analyst summit. We were talking to some analysts, and the question was, the airplane's going down, and you're in a board meeting, I gotta pick a parachute. There are only three parachutes, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which one do you grab? You got 10 seconds. >> To sell to or? >> No, just grab a parachute, and you hope that it opens and you live. Pick a parachute. >> Amazon, >> I'm going with Amazon. This one isn't hard. >> Microsoft and Google. The only person who's gonna grab the Microsoft parachute is the guy who's been with Microsoft for 30 years and knows they're not gonna let him down. If you're a forward-facing company you're going with Amazon, and if you're nuts, you're gonna grab Google right now. No offense to my friends at Google. >> So we're sitting here at Reinvent, so I feel like that's a trick question. (laughing) >> Well, that's good. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, they do take care of their own. >> They do. >> Their DNA is tuned to ISVs, they're very good at it. >> and that's their track record. Well, the one guys says, well it depends. By the time you argue with the parachute the planes (mumbles). But it does depend on your business. >> Sunil: Yes. >> Nick: Yes. >> But it is hard not to look at this show and say this is what electricity was in 1920. >> Final question, obviously Amazon is looking at all steam ahead, business models are changing, you're starting to see the top of the stack develop nicely, moving up the stacks seems to be the trend. You got this decentralized market up there. Bitcoin hit 10,000. A lot of smart alpha geeks, including some of the guys here at theCUBE team, is looking at ways to kind of leverage this decentralization trend in a way that's productive. Yet there's a lot of scams out there with these ICOs. Decentralization good or just another infrastructure dynamic? Thoughts on this whole decentralized token economics wave? Also the FCC has regulations now in it. Is it disrupting VC? Your thoughts, Nick. >> Do remember what H.L. Mencken said? "A fool and his money are soon parted." so I think anyone who sits there and says I understand completely what an ICO is and what I'm buying and doesn't view it as something that'll be a tax deduction for next year, I think is gonna be in for a bumpy ride. >> Get out your Gartner Hype Cycle. And if you don't know what it is, go look it up, and there's a spot right now of where we are in the hype cycle, and I think the movement my finger tells you where we are, but this is coming, but this comes afterwards. >> I heard this argument, the web is just for kids. No one will ever use the web. Browsers is a toy. >> A K memory is all you'll ever need. >> Yeah, but guess what, guess what, 2001 happened before we got to 2017, so let's never forget where we are at that kind of hype. >> ICOs are like subprime mortgages, and I speak Spanish and I can't even read the thing. That is what an ICO is. >> So certainly hyped up. Winter's coming, we'll see. All right, we got the VCs here, Nick and Sunil. We got Amplify and Ignition Partners here in theCUBE. More live coverage day one after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice. Happy to welcome back to the program Sunil Potti. Fresh off the keynote here, 2200 in attendance here at the second annual European show. Sunil is the chief product and development officer, and Sunil, your team's been busy. >> Yes. >> Product development-- >> Sunil: I hope so. >> 5.5, ton of new features in development, a lot of things going on. So let's step back for a second though, and it's a year after the IPO, I watched The Wall Street guys, they're always like, "Wait, are they boxes, or are they software, "are they infrastructure, are they cloud?" You know, you kind of step back, it's, I liked it, it was, "simplicity takes real genius," and then you're like, to try to appeal to the European cloud, it was "more tea, less clicks." So what's the kind of, as people think of Nutanix, when do we think of you, why do we think of you? >> Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of moving parts there, but I think our core thesis hasn't changed from where it was pre-IPO, post-IPO, multiple conferences. I think the core thesis as you know, Stu, is that we fundamentally think folks talk about hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud, the first step is we know public clouds exist, true private clouds haven't been built yet. And they have to be first standardized, commoditized, and then harmonized with the public clouds, right? So I think, from our perspective, the core thesis is the fact that, if you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there'll be a ton of workloads that stay inside. But with the right experience, for the right cost, right? >> Yeah. >> And essentially, that journey hasn't wavered from our perspective, right? So we're still on that. >> Yeah, absolutely, at Wikibon, we said, you know, cloud isn't a destination, it's really more of an operational model. >> Sunil: Sure, sure. >> So, if we can capture that, as you say, true private cloud, we said, we're starting to get there, and we actually credit Nutanix. So you know, of course, the messaging of enterprise cloud was probably a little bit aspirational-- >> Sure, sure. >> At the beginning, but you're filling in the pieces, you've got the partnerships, you've got the products rolling out, so, let's talk about your bread and butter. You know, what's new, what's launching now, I like that you're as a software company, you show a little bit more. Here's when we test some things out, it's that balance of, for the enterprise it's like, "Wait, is this going to work the way I think it is?" You put stuff out like the community edition first, let people play with it and then you GA it-- >> I think we talked a little bit about it and essentially, rather than me list out a whole series of functionality, I think the way we are also looking at it as well as building it, as well as rolling it out is in the form of what a customer can consume. So we are investing at Nutanix, like, capabilities that cross the life cycle, right? So we're investing and ensuring that communication gets a lot more emphasis because we think this paradigm of one-click data centers is something that people need the ubiquity to kind of play around with, right? So you see community relation from a learning side, then we're looking for capabilities for people to actually say and compare, "Look, Nutanix is one architecture, "we experienced another architecture, "three tiers in other architecture, "maybe public cloud." At some point in time people need the flexibility to actually have in the old world of TPC benchmarks the new world of what I would call production world benchmarks so we had a whole bunch of tools such as X-Ray coming out, then rather than leave it to professional services and so forth, rather than just worry about reducing the number of clicks once you have Nutanix, even before you get to Nutanix, how do you reduce the number of clicks? You get to Nutanix, right? That's where Xtract, which is a very popular tool from us again, that has been shipping for a month, for now, where you can actually click at a certain VM environment, at a certain database environment, and essentially, literally, without a whole bunch of lift and shift move into a private cloud environment, right? >> And my understanding, Xtract is, I could take my VMs really from VM environment to an AHV environment-- >> That's correct. And it also works on databases as well, like SQL databases, and so forth, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, that migration is something that, you know, it's like a four letter word for most people in IT. One of the things that we were early on kind of beating the drum on, is traditional three-tier architecture with the storage, your migration cost was at least 30% of the total cost of ownership because you had to bring data on, eventually you had to take data off, as opposed to, if you really have more like a pool, which is what HCI does, you know, that first, once I get on to it, that's the last time you need to do a migration because now I can move and add, remove, it knows, and we just kind of manage it there. Absolutely the other company I hear talking a lot about this thing is Amazon. You know, they've been working on database migration lots of companies, changing away their environment, and it's something that customers are looking for. >> Yeah, and it's almost like, for us with the public cloud at least you have a genuine sort of big hop in lift and shift, just because of the boundaries. It's a shame if we can't solve that problem without what we call make lift and shift invisible inside the data center at least so that's why we invest in things like Xtract so that people can, look, we're still less than one percent of the market so we expect a whole lot of migration to happen over the next few years. So anything that we can do to kind of accelerate customers to the point of ensuring that their architectural integrity is preserved in terms of environment I think it's a big focus for us. So you're going to see as emphasize Xtract not just for there for VM's or databases to Nutanix on pRAM. We're also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility because imagine Calm as a construct that you're able to go in, proficient work loads and it's on pRAM or off pRAM but at some point in time you want to move them back and forth. You know the thing that we used to always say? "App mobility is slowly coming to fruition "with some of these constructs." >> Calms is the centerpiece of really your multi-cloud strategy. We've talked to some customers that some of the early folks pretty excited about it. A lot of the others have been like, "Okay, well, I've seen some slides and a demo," kind of squinting, looking at it. Reminds me of the early days, "I bet it can't really "do what they say it does." >> I think they have to taste the wine, just like everything else. There were a bunch of early believers who saw the product, who used the product, which we used as an early access program. But we took a step back when we acquired Calm a year ago, we had the choice of releasing a reasonably big product to mainstream. It's been seven years building our product, they had rewritten it two times. So they had already done a rewrite or two. What we took was, we took the time to ensure that it was burned into the Nutanix fabric. It had to fit into a Prism, it had to fit into a life cycle manager, it had to fit into a one-click update. It needs to look and feel like a natural extension versus a power-sucking alien, which is what we've seen with many of our competitor's products where you just buy some things and you put it in there and the more successful it is, the harder it is to homogenize. So we took our time, and that's what you're going to see in 5.5, customers can now actually genuinely use the product. And day one it'll have AHV support, AWS support, very quickly it'll have ESX, and GCP and Azure and it's a separate code train by the way, in a sense that the same code-base but it's being delivered as a service and you're going to see more and more of that paradigm where Nutanix is no longer going to be this blob of capabilities that in itself comes out fast but there's a bunch of microservices now that are going to be released. Not just on the cloud, but also on pRAM. So AFS is a good example, Xtract is a good example, Calm is a good example and now with 5.5 even Prism Central is going to be detached so that you can consume that at a different velocity than the code. >> How do you make sure that you balance that with the simplicity that really is the core piece of your business proposition? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean I think this is where we just have to be measured in ensuring that it's still one single code-base for example. What we want, we can't afford to have 18 different branches. So simple things like that will actually go a long way to make sure that somebody can still go to a console and say upgrade, it checks the right provisions. It's a little bit invisible, sort of like version mismatch of that is our problem, not a customer problem. >> Absolutely, so a lot in 5.5, which we haven't touched there but also really unveiling some of the next step in the journey, what you're working on for the next six months. What's the focus there, ya know cloud is, I think you talked about visible infrastructure to invisible cloud so looks like kind of expanding out and building out some of those cloud services. Take us through some of that. >> So I think the general theme is continue to fulfill our ambition around making infrastructure more invisible and then at the same time in parallel try to make clouds invisible and I'll break it down into three kinds of products. The first one is, we still have our journey, our things cut out to actually fulfill what I would call the A block, the Amazon block for the enterprise, and you can call it the Azure block or you can call it the Alphabet block now that we support multiple clouds. The point being that simple things suggest, we've done a great job of computer storage and virtualization. What about networking? And we've always said look, the problem is not in the data plane not working, top of the ax switches are pretty commodity, they work, you name it. The issue is always in the control plane, when something goes wrong, what are doing wrong, so that's one of the big things coming in 5.5 is built in network virtualization, provisioning, and one-click micro segmentation. And again the point being rather than buy very expensive products such as NSX or some other overlay products where you're virtualizing the network to secure the network. If you go to Amazon, or you go to Google, or you go to Azure not only do they not require to virtualize, the way that micro segmentation is built is genuinely with the simplicity of one click. You take out 10 VM's, put them in a secular group you're off to the races right? And the same paradigm then basically moves to us so in that vein of fulfilling that stack is one dimension. And a couple of key things that are new there that are in the next six months timeframe, not in the 5.5, the fact that when everything's said and done we've got a file service, we've got blocks, we've got containers, everything else, but what about object storage? Sounds obvious, right? So we've taken our time to kind of build a next generation object storage service, not a first generation one that can scale obviously to the levels of webscale that these days customers want, but is deployed with gentle requirements. An example of a gentle requirement is, you can't build an object story service that is simply on pRAM or simply off pRAM anymore. It has to be hybrid from day one. My primary needs to be data locality quote unquote to be invisible under the cover so my primary stuff is closer to my compute whereas my secondary and backup can be pulled out into the cloud. And the same thing applies on, even something much more simpler, which is EC2. What about EC2 for the enterprise? And that's where I think we were inspired to actually go build us Acropolis Compute Cloud, AC2, which essentially says you can take my Nutanix class, computer storage, and all of that, but then only have compute only nodes, and you could have SAB, SK lab requirements, you could have IBM power, you could have Oracle running on those, but they are essentially being managed with that single pane of glass. So this is the first time that you're seeing, based on a customer demand, now EH3 is now almost one of the three nodes being shipped is an EH3 node. We've come a long way in the last two years right? So people covet that simple virtualization, especially if we can, we extend it from a computer only fabric to the hyper-con only fabric. So I think that's one dimension-- >> It's interesting, just happenstance, that in the news recently, Amazon just announced that they're switching from Zen to KVM base so similar. Come on, you couldn't get Amazon to just sign on for AHV? >> No, see I think see what it is is that frankly AHV from our perspective was all about just ruggedizing KVM right, make it storage, Iops work well, the management plan work well, in fact, the fact that AWS is doing that is actually a good sign for us to go deeper with them frankly just as a tangent, rather than just go deeper with say Zi or GCP and so forth just natively as well now with C-fi instances there's an opportunity for Nutanix fabric to kind of seamlessly leverage that because the core constructs are similar with KBM right? So you're going to see some interesting stuff come up there, maybe that's for the next CUBE, the next conference. >> Sunill, it's interesting I've had a chance to talk to a few customers already and we talk about kind of that cloud, everything from the Germans that well I've got governance and compliance and I'm not not doing public cloud to, you've got a customer speaking today in a session that's like "I'm going to do "everything SAS and what I can't do SAS "I'll do infrastructure service," and then there's a little bit of stuff I can't do because I don't have enough network or things like that, and that's when Nutanix fit in for me. Making products and dealing with customers on such a broad spectrum is a little challenging and trying to fit where Nutanix is on that cloud because right if they're buying SAS from a lot of pieces it's like well you're not going to be as critical as opposed to somebody that's like well hey my data center is really my temple and you can help there so-- >> Yeah I think the philosophy that we use in terms of our product strategy and roadmap there is to maybe just give some color on it is it's the curse of the platform. The wealth of the platform which is like we are a platform company and we've internalized that, we're not a simple product company, so a lot of this comes down to what do we not do as well right which is versus what we just do. And one simple filter that we use is, is it directionally in a secular motion for enterprises or not. So a simple example is look, a lot of customers, and we would have probably quite a bit of sales if we simply said look I can take my existing Nutanix class serve, I just bought a three part array, I've bought a narat box, why don't you guys just co-exist with that. But then if you really think about it, it's like AWS coming to you and saying, "Oh by the way, take my service environment, "put my AWS software on it." It's like Apple coming out and saying, "Here's iOS, "I want it on Blackberry." So one click upgrades won't work, it's not the right thing. So there are things like that that we stayed away from that allows us to, even if we are stretched, lean in on the forward looking circular motions such as first, continue to finish the job inside, then harmonize inside and outside, and then go provide specialized services like Zi, in addition to what we're doing with DCP or Amazon, and others. >> Alright, last question I have for you, what's exciting you in the marketplace today, getting your engineers kind of fired up as kind of this next wave? >> Yeah I think look, I think some of the biggest thing is around how apps are now being re-platformed themselves, not just infrastructure and people used to word pass and all that other stuff but essentially I think we are now getting into the golden era, or the initial golden era where IAS re-platforming is more or less known. Now, of course it's going to take you five, 10 years to do it, but I don't think people are debating the way to do that. It's no longer open stack inside, it's no longer hosted clouds and all that crap right? It's two clouds, right? I think that wave has to emerge on the application side as well, you're starting to see some of that with communities, now becoming a defacto for one sliver of it, but there's so many other services that are up for grabs. So I think you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months and you're obviously going to see Nutanix play a role there, is what does it mean to not hybridize my data center but what does it mean to hybridize my app. And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity, interesting inspirational stuff there from an innovation perspective that keeps our guys going. >> Absolutely well Sunil, always a pleasure to chat with you, look forward to catching up with you at the next time and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix dot Conf, everybody, sorry, .NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Stu Minamin. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We have a real treat for you, the day two keynote was done by Sunil Potti, who's the head of product, Chief Product Officer in development at Nutanix, long-time CUBE guest. Sunil, good to see you again. Thank you for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Good to be here. >> Agree with Stu, great energy in the keynote this morning. Have to say, we got in there, Stu, at around ten of, the place was not packed, but by the time you started, the play was packed. We heard the Lenovo party went till like two a.m. >> Stu: The extent of it. There was some excitement. >> People came in and, yeah, lot of cheering, so you must feel pretty good about that. >> Yeah, now I think, I was telling some of you guys, I think right now we are in our growth years where it sort of feels like we've got a lot of fans because folks want to sort of relate to technology companies that foundationally are disruptive and keep disrupting. It helps folks' careers, it helps their personal lives, everything, right? So, the wipe that we get out of these .NEXT conferences are mostly about this, well, not so young people, they feel young using the technology at work and while at the conference, so that's, I guess, part and parcel of some of the, sort of the excitement that you're seeing probably. >> Well, so let's get into it. I mean, a lot of announcements this week. Where do you want to start? >> I think, that's a big question. There's a lot of stuff. >> Maybe we start with the strategy, which you laid out two years ago, we're not just HCI, we're goin' cloud. So that's sort of the set-up, and you've had a number of proof points and product announcements this week that underscore that strategy. >> I think I'll break this down into four parts, just to structure it, which is, obviously we've moved way beyond HCI, we subsumed virtualization, and then, we said cloud, if you remember 2015, and then we improved on it in 2016 and so forth. The big thing was every few years it gives you an opportunity to truly offer a step function change in transformation with the company, and that's 2017 for us is. That's why the announcements are all so packed, it's not just an incremental set of things. Let me break it down into four segments. One, the first thing is the fact that it truly is clear to us and to our customers that this needs to be this single software-centric fabric that gives you optionality of any hardware platform, any hypervisor, any consumption model, whether it be a pay-as-you go, it could be appliance-driven, it could be pure software ELAs and so forth. And then, obviously with our partnerships with Dell, Lenovo, support of Amazon and Azure, and now Google in a big way from the public cloud side, and I'll come to, but then extending that to our software support on Cisco and HP, and now with IBM, power especially, changing the game in terms of an enterprise worker. The first sort of segment of capabilities is to really make it look like our platform story is becoming an OS that cuts across, if I can call it, all of our applications, deployment full factors while being open. So that's the first category. Let me just maybe quickly summarize, and then we'll come back. >> Perfect. >> The second is the fact that, look, while we we're doing that, we were still taking an infrastructure-centric view, whether it's VMs, containers, whatever it is. So now, what we've found is that fundamentally we need to change the operational construct, elevate it to be an application-centric work, and that's where Calm comes in. Independent of hybrid clouds, just from a private cloud side itself, even if I'm just elevating my current infrastructure to a private cloud, an app-first automation is a good thing, and then, what we've done is in that second category is to merge, quote-unquote, on-prem infrastructure with off-prem using this multicloud thing. That's the second thing, that's Calm. The third thing is the fact that, well guess what, while we can bring provisioning and operational convergence with Calm, true lift and shift is still very high because the stacks on both sides are different within public cloud and private cloud, and that's where Xi comes in, which is our new cloud services. Essentially, it replicates your on-prem stack and seamlessly extends your data center so you can do some things like one-click DL and so forth. And the last but not the least was as we were building Xi, and we'll get into it, Google and Nutanix have started getting really close from a technology integration and a delivery perspective where things like Xi could become ubiquitously delivered, but more importantly, I could take Google Cloud past services and fuse them with Nutanix enterprise solutions. So, those are the four. >> Sunil, let me poke at something. We've heard this story before, broad, lots of choice, let's build an ecosystem, but AHV seems to be a strong component, so Xi, you got to use AHV, you got to use Nutanix replication. It's like you've got lots of choice unless you want to use all these cool things we're doing, in which case you want the full Nutanix stack. >> And I think that's a constant thing for us is, look, at the end of the day, to us lock-in should be by choice, not by need. It's up to us to offer a series of value-added services on our full stack, but customers choose to go to that full stack for value. It's just like on-prem, right? I mean, look, 60, 70% of our enterprise workloads are still ESX-based, Hyper-V is still there, under the cover SuperMicro or NX is no longer 100%, it's coming down. Frankly from a customer perspective of deployment, that's where they start, maybe they'll stay there. We can add value to that environment, but if you use AHV, you get micro-segmentation for free, it's one click. It's up to the customer to choose to use AHV based on the choice at that point. And the same thing applies to Xi as well, saying, look, on day one it'll replicate on-premise to off-premise, but on off-premise, at least on the enterprise side, Stu, we will still support ESX and Multi, you know, essentially the open environment is still a source for us. The target, on day one at least, we can build an honest product without being completely integrated. >> And Sunil, definitely there's choice there, even look at the Google announcement. Well, they've got the HV solution tour if you want to go down the containerization, Kubernetes, that's going to be somewhere. We've been positing that the partnership with Google should help you accelerate that move towards containerization. We know it's early for a lot of customers, but any commentary you can give on virtualization? >> Absolutely, and in fact, I would say containerization sort of expanded to the broader cloud-native workloads aspects, which is to us the big thing that customers came to us, and we've seen that now resonate as they just don't want DR. Obviously, one-click DR is a big deal, if you can pull it off by replicating the stacks. But really what they want from the enterprise side is they want to take enterprise apps that they are elastic, consume them as a cloud service, but co-locate them in such a way, not just in the data center level, but at an application-operations level, application-integration level, so that they can co-reside as if they were on the same node with a set of Google past services. So essentially, think about it, I've done all this work to do one-click DR, I have mode warehouse management system running SQL server or something else into the Nutanix cloud, that's a little bit easy now with Xi, but now, I can now run a big query app, I can honestly use those services as if they were in the same VLAN, and that's the real power of isolating containers. >> I love that, and I guess the easy compare on that is later this year we expect VMware on AWS to run. I'm sure you would posit that VMware and Amazon, you know, pricing might be a little bit different than the Nutanix and Google offering and what services and how you have them, a little different. >> I think, I'm sure you get a lot of responses on that one, but I'll tell you my take is, actually, even before comparing the approach. First of all, just philosophically, I think the strategy it makes sense of trying to make hybrid invisible, in general, right? I mean, vCloud frankly was the first cut at that. The way we look at it was vCloud was the right use case, wrong implementation. And to me, I think that is still the most important thing, which is before we build this hybrid cloud, whether it is with AWS or Google or anybody else that we've talked to and over at Nutanix or VMware, you still have to build a proper private cloud, as in the cloud that powers your primary data centers needs to look like a true Google or AWS. And to us, unless someone re-engineers that stack that's going to not be the same as, oh, even if I took, if I can call it, a half-baked fiber cloud, and I extended it as a service, it's still half-baked hybrid cloud. That's going to be the big thing, I think, that's going to turn things up. >> And that led us at Wikibon to coin this term, "true private cloud." We get a lot of grief for that term some time, but we saw a lot of cloud-washing, and the concept is basically to substantially mimic what's in the public cloud on-prem, and then, create a control plane that spans multiple physical locations. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Now, one of the things I've been getting a little grief on in this show, 'cause we think Nutanix is an instantiation of what we call true private cloud. One of the folks in our community who has been hitting on me, and he actually wrote a piece, this guy, Yaron Haviv, he's a very sharp guy, said that guys like you and others have no chance against the public cloud because he said this, "HCI is stateful," I want to read it and get your feedback. "HCI is stateful, its VMs, its vdisks, "they're like IT pets with a lot of labor. "AWS is stateless with micro-services, "its object, its database is a service, AI is a service, "and it's built for devs." I know you understand this, but how do you respond? >> I think, look, you know, frankly, we had a choice as a company a couple of years ago when we were growing, the primary question for this company was, well, if the apps are moving outside, forget about IAS or AWS, it's us, and users are moving outside, again, forget about dev and object store and all that. It's about consumerization because of mobility, everybody's got a phone, they can access an app. Who worries about infrastructure? As an enterprise infrastructure company, that's a secular question to answer, right? For us-- >> It's profound. >> For us, there's a reason why we didn't pack up and sell the company and move on. There's a thesis for the company. The thesis for the company is that we fundamentally think that cloud is not a zero sum game. And we're seeing that not just with the largest assets, like all the big dot-coms that went with cloud, defined cloud, and they're coming back now. One of your popular, whether it's your, you can call it your consumer devices that actually started with their service completely, as they grow, they're actually moving half of their services back to the private cloud. I think but it applies to the mainstream enterprise, which I call the fact that because public cloud is not a zero sum game not because of security or compliance, because those are temporal things, in my opinion. The moment AWS puts a data center right beside my data center, security is a little bit, compliance or data regulation is a little bit avoided. The real reason is purely going to be a financial choice for the kind of workload. If it's a predictable workload, even if I could re-engineer it, if it's predictable, it's kind of like me coming in, staying here in D.C. for three days, I'll rent a hotel. If it's there for a year, I'll lease an apartment. If I'm there for five years, financially, accel makes certain math deal, right? Doesn't matter if my costs are cheap, it's going to just work that way. I can buy hardware, cap excise it, amortize and so forth. I guess the simple answer to it is eventually I think there'll be 100% of the market will move. In some markets, there'll be 70-30, in some markets, it'll be 30-70. We are in 1% of that market, so for Nutanix, the more someone tastes the wine of public cloud, the faster they'll actually make the transition of their private infrastructure to look like Amazon. And in that sense, we are like, look, that's why want to do Xi is because Xi actually takes DR infrastructure away from us. We're probably making more money selling Nutanix in the DR data center when we are accelerating the move because we think that that eventually accelerates every workload to come through the primary infrastructure in Nutanix. At the end of the day, it's going to be not about objects, which is vdisk, I mean, he's right also, in the sense that shame on us if we don't have a level of abstraction that is app-centric, then you don't have really care about whether it's an object storage or vdisk or anybody, so that whether it's a developer or an IT operator, they use the same operation levels. >> Sunil, we like that Nutanix is putting out a vision, my understanding, you know, the cloud service next year? >> Sunil: Yeah, early next year. >> What I'm a little worried about is, we're almost out of time with you, and you went through so many different pieces. There of course, there's the Calm. We're going to talk to Aditya in a little bit, but maybe give us some of the highlights as to the stuff that's shipping now or soon that your customers have been talking about. >> What's happening is basically you take those four segments, the core software fabric evolving across every platform and so forth. There's a bunch of stuff that has started shipping in the 5.1 release which came out a few months ago, and a lot of it was shipped in the 5.5 release that's coming later in the year. Calm is part of that release, as you guys know, it's part of the same, it's baked in. We had a choice, so basically Calm has been engineered a couple of times over six, seven years. It's not a vulnerable product, but we took the time from last year, we didn't release it, create a Frankenstein, a power-sucking alien on the side, like some other tools. We took the time, to be honest, to integrate it into the console. You saw it, I mean, it's apps, it's taken time. Functionally, it's there. But that'll be part of the same release, and then, the Xi project will be early 2018. The Google integrations will come in a staged way, even as early as later this year with Calm and Kubernetes and so forth, and then extending to Xi. So the timeframe that we're talking about is probably minus three month to plus nine months. >> So, the DR solution that you showed, though, that is native Nutanix tech, right? That's not partners in the ecosystem. >> It's Nutanix software delivered as a full stack, and this is another thing that we had to take a hard call. It is raging debate couple of years ago is like who builds a public cloud in these days? Because that'll be the obvious question. And the question was really, it's not about building a public cloud, are you building a cloud service, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, are you being honest in the product design? Do you do billing and metering in one click? We don't do that today. But as building a cloud service through Xi, we are building all those for our private cloud customers. And so, the goal was, kind of like six years ago, the easy answer was to take Nutanix, sell our software and say we are VMware for the new era, not worry about BIOS firmware, upgrades, and all that stuff. And so, until we did Nutanix on SuperMicro, people actually believed that the market existed, and then, Dell and Lenovo and others came to buy. Same thing applies with Xi in an accelerated way. The moment we have the conviction to go build a full stack, make it look like an exact replica, but build these cloud capabilities, that's the big thing that I think some of our competitors didn't do was they took the same stack that was in the cloud and quickly tried to make it a cloud service. That's the reason why we are starting with our own service and data centers, and then, scaling through Google, for example, as a way for not just get global reach, but also to merge cloud-native apps with these enterprises. >> But the other obvious question, and I'm sure you guys had that conversation about this internally is, some of the folks in our ecosystem are in that space, and is this competitive to what they're doing? You guys have always been a customer problem solving company, but what was the conversation like in that regard? >> It hasn't come up, to be honest, I think the cloud service aspect is still relatively new, it's siloed, I mean, we are pretty clear. This is not an end-all, be-all service. We don't want to overreach from our things. It's about, look, you first move to Nutanix on-premise, and it's your choice to say, it should be as simple as, "I provision VMs, and the more VMs I have, "or containers on Nutanix, I should right-click "and say protect." And just like iCloud for the iPhone, they're in the cloud, right? That's the goal, the true product goal. >> That Amazon-like experience that you're describing. >> And it's a service that's integrated into it. And so, when we have partners who have been hosting Nutanix, if you're talking about service providers, you've already had questions on, rather than just create yet another service provider partner program that automatically conflicts at all, eventually what we think is that we will offer turnkey services, not a general purpose infrastructure. There's always use cases where somebody wants to outsource their primary data center, and that's where a lot of our partners will be, especially the mid-tier partners are in the mode of outsourcing the full data center, and for them, offering one-click DR on their primary outsource thing is another advantage. >> He's too good, we're not going to let him go yet. >> Sunil: No, no, keep going. >> Are we done? >> Central, some of the other announcements outside of the cloud, can we just touch on some of the highlights there? >> They're all part of the core fabric, and unfortunately, they get subsumed into the, you know, when you have big announcement, they kind of subsumed. But a couple interesting things that came up is I think, and this particularly I'm pretty fond of couple of features. One is Acropolis File Services. I made this joke about killing an air app a couple of years ago, and people keep reminding me about it. I think it's one of our fastest growing features in the last six to nine months, and it's a natural sale for us. People go in there, it's been a little bit limited because of SMB functionality, but now with NFS, it opens up that. Another one, though, that's probably more secular is this concept of machine learning now coming into mainstream. People talk about AI and all that, and it is a lot of churn for us, but it all comes down to manifesting itself as tangible things that the customer sees. For example, if I can show that certain amount of down time genuinely reduced from four nines, it became five nines, without the operator having to do anything, then it is becoming intelligent. I think our bar for machine learning, which you will see more and more, by the way, as a secular thing, I think, I'll predict that not just from Nutanix. >> Dave: Sure. >> AI, if I have to use the word, is going to become more prominent in the next few years, just like cloud was. >> So, Sunil last question I have for you. From a development standpoint, where won't Nutanix go? >> Where will we not go? Great question, so for example, there's an obvious thing like AWS. It says let me instrument every service that sits on my platform. If I like that service, I might end up doin' it. The classic, if I can call it, the tyranny of being a platform partner. See, for us, I think because of two things. One, our ceiling of our current market is super high right now, Stu, right? I mean, we still, yeah, it's a billion bucks, growing 50, 60%, whatever, but we're still, even if half the business goes to AWS, Google, and Amazon, we can still be a company larger than we were. >> It's nearly a trillion dollar market. >> I mean, it's a big market, so therefore, we don't have to be greedy about near-term. We can be long-term greedy. >> Dave: Alright, we got to go. >> All right. >> Thanks so much for coming on, we really appreciate it, Sunil. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)

live from Seattle Washington it's the cube covering dr. Kahn 2060 brought to you by dr. now you're your host John furrier and Brian Grace Lee okay welcome back and we are here live in Seattle Washington for Doc archon 2016 this is SiliconANGLE media is the cubes our flagship program and go out to the events and extract the signal from noise I'm John fourth by coach Brian Grace Lee our next guests Emil khandekar was the CEO of nuage networks part of Nokia welcome to the cube thank you to see you right so my doctor madness is really exploding in the developer community certainly galvanizing the digital transformation at the end of the day we always say in the cube the network's a bottleneck you got it and it's really about what's under the hood we just had talked to head biggest startup about storage you see a lot of disruption certainly and how infrastructures being technology being developed and make it more programmable yeah where is the story with the network where's that fit in what's the updates there because this is the day that's a critical piece of the pie indeed absolutely for ultimately for apps to be deployed on the network on any infrastructure as you said network has to get out of the way to create that developer efficiency to allow for applications to be deployed very quickly and how do you make that happen because containers are really being talked about we are the conference 4,000 plus people fantastic however CIOs know that they have not only the container technology to deal with but they have virtual eyes were closed and have had those words will eyes were closed for a long time they have bare metal servers that are supporting applications that probably will never move for a while so you have these very changing very dynamic environment and you have to understand how the networking can tie those things together seamlessly that's where we come in as much networks because your networks is essentially Sdn venture of Nokia and what we have at large networks what we've done is it's a modern Network policy based automation platform that allows for any workload whether it's a virtualized workload weather is a container workload whether it's a bare-metal server all to come together and be stitched automatically to allow for that application to be deployed quickly how is that different from other Sdn cloud architectures right you guys are doing within Nokia right so first and foremost what we have is it's a platform that we've built it's a virtualized services automation platform it's not a point solution for only the data center assets to be automated or only the SD when as it's called branch to be automated what it is it's is declarative policy-based automation platform that allows for which is open by the way completely open incorporates open source technologies and allows for all types of workloads if it's in and across data centers so virtualized workloads bare-metal workloads existing were closed as well as incorporates different hypervisor and cloud management system technologies and allows for connection to the branch and to the white area so you're saying it was built for cloud in mind is that what it was very much built for cloud enablement in mind making sure that we didn't forget on the way the existing environment and what you're seeing in the difference really between us and other platforms that are out there is essentially some of the SDN platforms are mono if you will and very narrow sliver they're based only for the data center and work on it on only on a mono hypervisor technology or some platforms are only looking at the SD van branch platform then were meant is such that you want and the cios want automation platform that is consistent across private on-prem as well as public resources and works across multiple hypervisor technologies and the big deal there is because you say point technologies but that that's code word for the older older approaches which was you know back in the mini-computer land days internet internet working you stand up some networks have policies and certainly policy based in a packet management and that was it that's right and you manage it within the data center that's right and that was adequate at that time so a vertically integrated stack in that simplified environment was adequate now now have such a variety of use cases you have got to deal with the cloud native applications you go to deal with the older applications but you need a consistent platform because ultimately you're looking to align ID to business needs and how do you align idea to business needs you do that by getting the networking out of the way and creating automation but again delivering operational simplification getting network out of the way I love that I you know a lot of CIOs are CEOs are seeing startups get into their industry you know if you're in pure and automobiles there's people that are trying to disrupt you you're in hotels everybody knows about those would what what is that you know they go great i can go hire some application developers i want to go faster yeah somebody says gilts get the network out of the way who are who are you selling to them what who is that person that says that sounds great but i still got to figure out routing and i got to figure out security i got to make it highly available who's the decision-maker in your world these days great great question Brian so a couple of points one these days any large enterprise that is looking to IT to create differentiation for their core business and if that means almost every large enterprises rely on IT heavily for their requirements as well as to create a differentiation for their own for product whatever it might be but they saw tomato its farmers pharmaceutical its retail those are indeed the customer that we are talking to because what they have is their environment has shifted as John said earlier it's not very simply a simple environment the environment will become complicated and to do that the networking requirements have become a very sophisticated as in you need application isolation you need multi-tenancy you need the ability to deploy policy very very quickly you need effortless governance of your security policies and compliance you need to be able to stitch all these were close together and also have a strategy for private and public cloud what that means is you need the technologies that were available to the top of the if you will only tier one service providers and bring that to the enterprise's and that's what we have done what use can you what use cases specifically around containers and policy do you see out there okay you specific yeah absolutely so I'll give you an example of a customer that was in OpenStack betfair is online betting and we have my cubes yeah that's right you had richard i say i believe and and what they have is they have 100 million plus transactions in a day on their infrastructure dare use cases continuous integration anything that did that scale at that scale and and so they're using the wash to basically create that automation for all their workloads that's one use case the other use cases we have a very large fortune five company that is looking to use the watch for automation of their virtualized machines so they have a cloud stack and they have kvm based hypervisor with virtual as virtual machines and they're using containers with measles and watch is the only platform that's allowing them to stitch these environments together seamlessly apply the same policy and same so you guys are a platform for a cloud native like environment with existing infrastructure you bring those together we bring that together in a highly automated way and then we allow for security very important security as in we prevent you know spread of mile there we die very quickly being able to enforce the policies we provide multi-tenancy doctors a huge security nightmare because just as much the benefits can interoperate with I mean the applications can be put in containers so good viruses exactly a naked scale and that's what our job is to make sure that how do you do it it doesn't do that because by able to very quickly enforce policies and Quarantine the workload so upon detection of malware our system gets a notification based on that notification we are able to because we have full view of all the workloads whether they are in private data center of public data center or in the branch we can very quickly then quickly effectively and surgically quarantine that workload because we know exactly where that workload is and we know exactly the policy to enforce this also helps by the way this system also helps by you know you get a security threat alert today it's it's a brute-force approach you go down and shut down a segment now with this policy based automation you go to the policy and you say I want only this application to not be allowed to do use this protocol and instantly that policy is deployed yeah I'm sort of picking up on two things you talk about sort of end and the platform for everywhere a lot of that's because we don't have boundaries anymore you know mobile phone changes a boundary that its executive office people are moving around so you need to be you need to have that sort of end end visibility you don't have segmentation like you used to and you talk about policy you know I need to be able as a developer to go network team I need you to sort of give me a service and then I just want to call it I don't want to have to call you I might be working at two at night we might have to change something on the fly like that's why the policy piece is so important is that right you are absolutely correct Brian and that is so critical because ultimately what ID is struggling with is how do they enforce the governance the security governance when application needs to be deployed I teak generally gets in the way not because they want to because they want to enforce certain security certain compliance policies and until now it has always been that manual process now with the security policy based infrastructure what they are able to do is they are able to put the policy once and they're insured that that policy is deployed seamlessly across all their workloads and so they have to audit the policy once and it's guaranteed provisioning which is error-free provisioning so it's huge in terms of the ability for enterprises to react to problems but also any changes the agility this brings the system brings to the table because ultimately you know without the network there is really no cloud and this is why we're hearing people talk about sec ops and sec DevOps and really security integrated without automation consistently automatable same thing every single time absolutely we have a one customer which is again a very large financial base in New York and their issue was exactly that in terms of being able to when I'm talking their CSO and the chief security officer the biggest thing that they took away from our policy based automation was not only the ability to able to stitch all these environments together seamlessly but being able to provide compliance being able to provide the automated policy infrastructure for all their birth was being able to really provide that application isolation those are big deals yeah very big deals for the CX those and csos Sonia we gotta wrap but I want to get your final thoughts on nuage and Nokia like you spend a minute talk about the distinction between the branding of the sea of nuage honestly the name is different I'll see Nokia is big you guys are part of that yes I explain to the people watching what you guys are about size scope the kind of engagement revenue or and how that compares and contrasts to nokia which we're part of but integers so we had a wholly-owned SD inventor of nokia and what we are focusing on is this policy based automation network automation for the data centers wide area and the branches nokia provides us tremendous sponsorship they are very much behind cash is and they recognize the value in our ability to serve the largest of the largest enterprise customers but also because of nokia we are able to address and are involved in very large service Reuters of projects so that's what helps us be involved they have huge scale so the way we work is we focus on over RND the innovation we bring to the table the community that we serve but nokia provides us and the reach yeah reporting the resources but you're wholly-owned meaning you run and run independently if you will we are yes but we are fully owned by nokia we just operate and focus on this it allows us to number customers can you share some data yeah and if we completed two years in the market and in two years we have over 60 plus customers we have over 200 deployments that we have completed pilot trials and deployments but we have 60 Plus very large service droid our customers cloud service providers for huge integrations and also the very big very big enterprise customers i named a couple of Fortune five companies but we are in retail we are in high tech we are in health care the new fabric your new fabric in these big high scale infrastructures that have diverse needs and diverse workloads there and have the need to stitch all that together in a cohesive fashion to build that automated fabric for a poseable almost right composable yeah to ultimately bring agility and align ID to the business I love the word composable infrastructure it really treats the infrastructure is programmable which is the nirvana make it an invisible make it get out of the way get out of the way but yet make it effortless I leave highly performing too so indeed heuer high-performance invisible that's right that's infrastructure as code and Neil thanks for sharing your insight here and the cube really appreciate nuage networks the CEO here on the cube live at da Kirk on I'm John Foley Brian Grace Lee we write back you're watching the cube