(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're live here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage three days wall to wall. On our third day, I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Next guest Pai, who's the Vice President of Alliances and Business Development at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> We cover you user conference, but we're here at VMworld, which is VM ware's conference. >> Yes. >> You guys have a relationship, this is multiple years here. Just give a history, you guys are now a public company, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> You're doing well. Almost a year now. >> Tell us about the history with VMware and VMworld. >> Absolutely. I think our company was built on the fact that virtualization is going to be the future of the data center. Right? And if you look at the evolution over the last few years, that's been validated. We've been a partner with VMware since almost the inception of the company when we came out in 2010 2011. And in 2011, and we've now been in, this is our the seventh year. And we continue to see great momentum with our customers, and our partners, for that matter. As the seventh year, we are very much aligned with how the world is going. You know, hybrid cloud, in our multi-cloud world, and if you look at what we've done with our platform be it hyper-converge or the evolution of where that's going on with our role as Enterprise Cloud OS, we see a lot of synergy in terms of how VMware's approach to a software designed data center. And where we see the world going, "Hey everything needs "to be software defined. "And the architecture that's underneath that, needs to be invisible to customers. I think that's aligning very well, so it's happy to be here and our customers are very happy to see us here, and see both of us working closer together. >> And it's certainly been interesting to see the evolution of the partnership with VMware. When you guys first came out, I was like, "Wow "hot new company, come on in, infrastructure company." And then people realized, "Wow, this hyper-converged infrastructure thing, is really hot. "We should be doing that too." We remember we had Dheeraj on, right after there was a VxRack announcement, and he was welcoming it in, validation of course. First of all it's true, and that's what any smart CEO would say. But then it got very interesting when you guys announced Acropolis. And when everyone was pivoting to hyper-converge, you were pivoting to cloud. So what's behind that trend? How is that going? What are customers telling you? >> Sure. It's a great analogy of how we see the world. If you look how Nutanix germinated early in 2009, there where a couple of key trends in the market. When a public cloud was trying to become a very, very strong direction of where our customers wanted to go. Right? And if you look at what that direction meant, it was simplicity, so I can transmit through a single API, I can make infrastructure invisible, so I can therefore focus on the business and the business application that drives my business. And that's been the direction that we've taken. How do you make things simple for customers? And hyper-converge is an element of driving that simplicity. At an infrastructure level, we would drive that simplicity. And we've taken that theme and driven that all the way though, where we believe that, if you look at our fundamental team, as a Company (mumbles) cloud OS. Which is customers like cloud, but at the same time the direction they want to go is, "Take my applications, "Take it off premise in to a public cloud, "but the benefits of what public clouds mean. "I want it in my data center. "I can start small, grow at my space, have everything "simple to deploy." And that's been the direction we have continued to focus on. And that directionally has provided the true north of how we build our operating system stack. >> So on the customers side, I want to get your take on somethings. You guys have been very customer focused. First of all, you've been great technology, had a unique thing that no one saw, by the way. When we first interviewed Dheeraj, we're like, "This is going to be big." And just like my conversation with Andy Jassy at Amazon, the big winners are the ones who are misunderstood at the beginning. And then it becomes clear, "Why didn't we think of that?" Well, he did all the work. But you guys have to be customer focused. >> Absolutely. The success of VMware the success of Amazon, the success of you guys is to be customer focused. So I've got to ask you. "What are the VMware customers asking you, Nutanix, "to do for them?" What are some of the use cases? Where are you winning? And what does it mean for their customers? >> That's a great question. I think for us, the fundamental driver, what we try to do for customers, is, "How do we make things simple for them?" By simplicity, if you look at what we do is, for example, I'll give a simple analogy. One of the ways that we help our customers simplify infrastructure deployment, is make it a simple upgrade. So we have this concept of one-click upgrade. So what does that mean? What that means is, if a customers has an ESX running at say five dot five, and wants to move to six dot zero, the ability for them therefore to do that non destructively, so with a one click upgrade at a 3:00 p.m on a Wednesday afternoon, they can now upgrade the infrastructure. It upgrades the hypervisor, upgrades our software stack, upgrades the flash drives inside the system, and that ability to simplify a deployment of a VMware infrastructure becomes very easy for them. When they're running Vserv, they say we can more enable them at stacks. That ability to therefore make that simpler is a direction we want to make. Make go. So how do you make things simpler when they're running VMware environment? How do you make it simple to deploy in the EC application? Which is why, if a customer is running Horizon View and they want to deploy Nutanix, our deploy hyper-converge, we make it extremely simple to do that. So you can start small and still go from 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 with just a plug and play architecture, and the one click upgrade of the software stack that sits on top of the infrastructure. So that is simplicity we want to bring to our customers. >> So Pai, we had an interesting, Stu and I, John, we were at Dot Next, interesting conversation with Sunil Polepalli. >> Yeah. >> He had said at the time ... go back. You guys were doing really well and you could've exited the market, he said. We chose not to. We said, "Let's roll the dice and really go for it." That puts pressure on you and your colleagues, you in particular, as a business development executive For TAM expansion, of course the CEO as well. Very important that you now, if you're really going to go for the next level, you got to expand your TAM. And that took several forms. There was the Acropolis piece that got you into the cloud and multi-cloud business, that's clear. There were also an increased number of partnerships. Obviously the Dell partnership, Lenovo partnership, IBM with Picciano's group, very strategic relationships. And then of course, other go to market activities. >> Absolutely. >> I wonder if you could talk about that TAM expansion strategy as an individual who is at the heart of that. And take us through that and the process. >> Sure. Nobody can do this alone nowadays. It's a league of nations methodology, you have to leave in a cooperative world. You have to find a way to grow your market in a way that you can't do it alone. And we recognized that early on. And Deeraj, with the way he's built the business, it's about you can't do it alone. We were a small company back in 2010,. Yeah, we have the vision, but how do you execute in a way that we can take that vision, deliver it to thousands and thousands of customers. We have a multi-faceted go to market strategy, if you want to call it that. We depend very heavily on our partners to make us successful. Be that channel partners that have built up business on Nutanix. Be that the Sirius's of the four sides of the world, or companies like that. Be that as a segment, a part of our OEM strategy. When you have a software that simplifies customer's lives, you want to get it to them as quickly as possible. And I think Dell was early on in seeing that vision and saying, "Okay, I want to bring "that value to the customers." And Dell and Lenovo jumped on early on. Dell about four years ago almost, I'm thinking about how long it's been. And Lenovo a couple of years ago. And really, it allows us to reach a larger swath of customers globally much earlier. And give them the technology allowing them to differentiate themselves over the other, who receives as them, so that they're competitors. It gives them that differentiating factor. So it's a marriage of equals from a technology perspective and from a distribution perspective. If you look at what we did in terms of our technology partnership ecosystem, customers recognize that we're not the only game in town. They want us to partner with their strategic vendors and technology partners. So we built a very strong technology ecosystem. I think a couple of months you interviewed Laura Padilla on my team, on what the technology of the ecosystem does for our customers. Every customer conversation is less about, "Gee, "I like Nutanix, and here's what I want you to do more of." Which is obviously what they would love to do, but at the same time they respect what we do with VMware. Well what are we doing with >> It's a multi vendor world. No one company will dominate anymore. >> Correct. Correct. Exactly. >> Tell of the channel how you guys distribute, you rely on partners. >> Absolutely. >> On the sales side, is it direct? Indirect? What's the mix of business? >> So we don't sell direct. We only go through our channel partners. We have a strong channel partner ecosystem. >> So no direct sales. No one takes orders direct. >> No. Our sales guys work very closely with the channel partners, and they work very closely both with OEM's, and our channel partners. And both of them, for all of our OEM partners, they need to work with us when they're engage us in to a customer conversation, so that they can provide the best solution possible. So they don't go in rogue and say, "Here's Nutanix." And that creates conflict with the customer. >> This channel conflict is a disaster. >> Absolutely. So we maintain that >> How about professional services? Do you push that out to the partners as well? >> As much as possible. We have our own. So we have a services arm. Because at the same time, customers say, "Look. If I've got "Nutanix who's the best leader in understanding what "a technology is." We also have a services arm that allows us to lead with our conversation, but we train our channel partners with that same enablement technology. Saying, "You know what? "We can do it on our own, but we want you to lead that charge." As you know, channel partners lead a lot on services to drive their revenue. So it's not just about product and market, more it's about services, revenue; they can drive it at annuity level. We try the balancing act where we can lead the charge in technology for our customers, but at the same time lean on our channel partners to take that burden on, and therefore drive value for them as well. >> So while it's a multi vendor world, we certainly recognize that, again I come back to the decision that you guys made to be a leader. We sort of had a similar conversation with Robin Matlock, if you look at VMware, they want to be a leader. You have a particular opinion and point of view in the marketplace. And you're putting that forth. You really want to be the center point of management for multi clouds, from a data management perspective. >> Yes. >> And you're certainly growing from the point of your core customer base. That's a big ambition. >> It is a big ambition. >> Maybe we can talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. Our ambition is, if you look at the public cloud, you know five seven years ago, you just brought it up earlier. The ambition is very aggressive. And similarly, if you look at our ambition, we believe that methodology of making things simple for our customers. That does not stop at the hyper-converged world. It starts bleeding in to all the things that make operational complexity a burden for our customers, so they can focus on the business. When you start beating in to what that means, it means addressing some of the layers that make things complex for customers. So if you take your smart phone, all these hundreds of applications you may load on, those are all individual components that make your life easier. But how you bring that simplicity where you one click and you do things. So that's the germination of our methodology of the public cloud is transacted through a single API, but in the world of enterprise, you have hundreds of different vendors that need to work together to deliver the single API. Some of the new technologies we've learned, some of the new products we've launched, Is to bring that simplicity back into light. Be it on an application level. Be at an orchestration level. Or be it an infrastructure level. All those elements need to work together, through a single API for example, to make that simple. So customer's can't say, "I've got Nutanix, but Nutanix "is not the only infrastructure I have. Nutanix "is not just only ... "VMware is not the only hypervisor, I have." So how do I now bring that bridge together, so back to the multi vendor world, I can transact through Dell but I want to buy VMware, but run it on Nutanix, and use this orchestration layer, and go to the public cloud in a hybrid cloud world. And I've offices on oil rigs that need to be treated the same level as someone sitting in a data center. It's a complex world and you need to bring and have an opinionated design at some level, to bring that simplicity in and then diverge outside from that through an API based approach, to say, "You know what? We're not the only game in town." It needs to make sure that other companies can inter-operate, but make thing simple when you are in an opinionated world. >> And let the customer decide. Bringing your simplicity mantra to that world and say, "We think we're the best, here's why, "try it and see for yourself." >> Exactly. Right. So if you look at the new world, the new inner tagline is (mumbles) one OS, one click. That one click drives a lot of our methodology, making things simple. And one OS drives the ability for us to make that simple across the infrastructure stack, which bleeds from the public cloud approach, of what people are starting to like. >> Well Pai, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate the insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Great conversation with the time we got. >> It's great to see you again. Of course Nutanix, there's a lot of coverage on SiliconANGLE dot com, and Wikibon dot com, on YouTube a lot of great content from the next conference. >> Big plug for your show in Nice this fall. >> Yes. >> You guys will have the international conference >> Thank you for bringing that up. DotNext Nice. It's our second year in Europe and our third conference. It's in Nice, November 6th through the 9th, we look forward to having all of our customers there, and learn more about Nutanix and where we're going. >> And Stu will be there to cover it. >> Yes. >> And you guys just a plug on for that. You guys do a good job, great content, and nice digs. You always have it in a great place. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Customer or want to be a customer they have a good deal going on there. We're out of time. Thanks, Pai, for coming on. >> Thank you for being part of that journey, as well. >> That's theCUBE coverage of VMworld 2017. Nutanix, a great pioneer in the space, under the great entrepreneurial leader, Dheeraj Pandey. More CUBE coverage, after this short break. >> Thank you very much. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. It's the CUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now here is your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in San Francisco for The Cube. This Silocon Angle Media's flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-CEO of Silicon Angle Media with Peter Burris, head of research for Silicon Angle Media. He's also the general manager of Wikibon Research. Check out wikibon dot com for all the latest research and cloud, big data infrastructure. And we're at Oracle OpenWorld 2016. I'm excited to have our next guest, Don Johnson, VP of engineering for product development for the Infrastructures as a Service for Oracle Cloud. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> John: Thanks for spending the time to come on. We really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> And obviously Oracle's cloud last year was obviously the announcement they're marching to the cloud. A big building block in this, was Infrastructure as a Service. They had the sass. They're taking names, kicking butt in there and they're transforming. Platform as a service developing nicely this year, showed some progress. But the upgrade if you will, or reboot or reset, however you want to call it, was fundamentally to introduce the new stuff with Infrastructures as a Service, to kind of round everything off. Give us the update. What's the key new news for Infrastructure as a Service and why is it important? >> Well a couple things. Let me start with the last part of your question, why is it important. So, very broadly, I would say, There's kind of two strata of cloud. There's cloud platform and there's everything that's up above, apps, sass, etc. Cloud platform I think is a big category. It's broad spectrum but it's IaaS and Paas and then there's lots of stuff that falls inside of there. Iaas is a fundamental and foundational building block and all of the characteristics, that everything up above, relies on or requires is basically enabled by infrastructure If you want to run at massive scale, if you want network connectivity between place A and place B if you want intrinsic security, that's all things that are foundational characteristics and you either have them or you don't based on whether infrastructure IaaS gives them to you. And so, for us, for Oracle, we're a cloud platform company. This is a foundational piece, and we're investing in this very aggressively and we're driving in a very innovative direction on this. So, >> You've been at Amazon since 2005, just recently joined Oracle on the engineering side and you know, infrastructure right now we're seeing is a cost and performance game. Drive the cost down as low as possible while preserving scale and performance, real critical. And almost hardening the top if you will, creating a hardened infrastructure so that you can enable dev-ops and some coolness around agility all that good stuff above, on top of the could. So what's the key things this year that you guys filled in terms of product? What was the key innovations and, on the development side, what was the key sprint for you guys? >> Well, so what we've been announcing at IaaS is really our next generation infrastructure, which is two-fold. It is the infrastructure itself, what are data centers and networks and virtual network looks like and then it's a new suite of products that we put on top of this, bare metal cloud services. And this is the fruit of a big kind of back to basics foundational exercise where we have gone and redesigned everything from the ground up. We've done it with a focus on a bunch of core, core criteria. Core things that we wanted to, that we wanted to capture and that we wanted to do better, better than have been done in the industry to date. And I would characterize those as two-fold. First, we are bringing along, all of the best characteristics of the cloud and why the cloud is compelling and what people, use it for, Self-service, pay for to use. It's elastic; it's easy to use. It's, there's low friction. It's high-scale, etc. But there's a number of things that for our core customer-base, actually are very challenging in moving to the cloud. And when I say our core customer-base, if you have a large existing, you know, if you're an enterprise and you have a large existing infrastructure and deployment, typically on premise, you have a lot of constraints and it's difficult to actually move into this new environment and take advantage of all that it has to offer. And there are, this applies to how your applications will run there, the assumptions that they make, your security and controls. And so we've identified a number of areas that we fundamentally wanted to do better than they've been done before. Security, reliability, governance, the ability to manage, if you're a large complex organization, you have a large complex footprint and deployment in the cloud, the ability to manage it. Performance, performance is a broad spectrum. Peak performance, raw performance, predictable performance in a particular price performance. You're talking about performance and cost. And sort of an adjunct to performance is the ability to harness modern technologies because if you look at where storage is going, non-volatile RAM and technologies like Intel Crosspoint. How can you actually enable customers to get access to that and use it and harness what it offers, very, very quickly. And most, most of all really, flexibility. Sort of the choice and what I mean by that is when you're a cloud provider you, you kind of pick a, you pick a certain level at which you implement and define and build your abstractions, and then, that has consequences in what choices you actually offer. So let me be a little bit more precise about this. A core thing that we did, sort of the keys, the special sauce in any cloud platform is the virtual network. And we made a fundamental choice that the way in which we're going to do virtual networks is to pull the virtualization into the network itself where we think it belongs. >> John: So no hypervisor? >> It's not in the hypervisor. And so, what that means is first it means we're able to like the, the requirement that we have of something that we can plug into our cloud, your cloud, your virtual network is, it has an ethernet port. This means that we put, we can put anything into a virtualized network. Our whole infrastructure, you know the presentation to the customers is everything runs in a virtual overlay. It's all virtual network. But we could put any class of resource in there. We could do bare metal. We could do an engineered system. We can, honestly, we can take an arbitrary middle box from you know, any third party vendor. This lets us give our customers bare metal. Giving our customers bare metal means we can, we can take, so we provide bare metal, compute with NVME drives. They are phenomenal. There is nothing, like we're literally giving you a server in the cloud with a, you know, provision in minutes paid by the hour. And you get, in our biggest shape, you get in excess of four million 4k read-high ops. Like this is phenomenal power. So really there is nothing that stands between us, between the technology and us giving it to you. >> So that was the key design criteria, then? >> That was the key design criteria and so this you know, in terms of sort of, flexibility and preserving choice, this means, you know, principle you can bring any OS. You can bring any hypervisor. If you have some old stuff that's difficult to move, you can't break up our hypervisor. >> So you let the performance, everyone kind of speak for themselves if you will. So, the customer can put anything on this thing >> Yeah. And these are phenomenally powerful boxes. >> Okay so now, how does that compare with Amazon and Azure because the number one question I get is, and let me see if you can put some color around this. Obviously Amazon had a different thing. You guys had a clean sheet of paper and you took smaller steps, computed storage and built services and scaled up there. Azure had, kind of backed into it with their existing business and there portals and all their services and then now are moving their customers on there. So, the number one question I get is, well what's different with the IaaS on Oracle vis-à-vis AWS and Microsoft Azure. How do you answer that question? Is there a distinct difference? Is there a design philosophy? Is it? >> Well, the design philosophy for Iaas is what I was just articulating. And in essence it, it looks and acts very, very similar from the perspective of the customer, the user experience at scale. As well as, it preserves choice and flexibility and is amenable. Basically it is it is much more friendly to the large enterprise or large business that is outside of the, often times and typically, outside of the sweet spot of what an infrastructure like say Amazon was originally designed for. So as a principle, we are trying to meet our customers where they're at. From, they want to migrate over some apps and do it cautiously and maybe not change too much about them. And not see that as a constraint or an obstacle to get to all of the, all of the promise and power of, running modern applications in high-scale, highly available. >> Look in many respects, in many respects, cloud is naturally a network-centric compute model. >> Don: Yes. >> By putting more, by not putting network virtualization above the network but putting it into the network, does that also at some point in time give you greater flexibility, the option to bring even more of, >> Don: Absolutely. >> core work that's gone down into the network? So that you can actually start liberating some of the power of a real network computing model. Others can't do that right now. So if you think about it, what kinds of applications might that make possible in the future? Thinking about IOT for example, the ability to use a network model to describe how work gets allocated within a cloud of services? >> Well, I think the, the network ultimately, what you need it to do, there's a few things you need it to do. You need to very reliably and quickly move bits from place a to place b. You need it to it to have the flexibility sort of, as a topology to be able to put things in. And you need it to preserve, privacy and plugability. So the fundamental thing that I see our virtual network supporting and enabling, is basically building up a fabric of services, and letting us say, so everyone runs in a private overlay. We want to make it easy for any provider, ourselves as well as any third party provider, to inject micro-services into your, into your private network. We want to make it easy to be able to bring over traditional security controls, where, you want to, set up bastions and set up taps and be able to introspect you know, do, you know traditional IDS, IPS. So, I see network virtualization really as an enabler of, you know it's providing a fabric that lets you, that gives you great flexibility in wiring things together. I hope that answered your questions. >> So final question for you, what's next? So what's on the, what's the priorities on the to-do list for you guys as you go down, a two point five, a two point one? As they say at Microsoft, never make it an odd, an even number, make it a, you know. Two point one or two point five or three point o. What's next? >> There's a ton of things. So we're building up data centers and new geographies. We're going big. We're going to add a ton of skews. We're going to make bigger things, smaller things, adding, a ton more features really all across the board. So I don't know that I see it as there's a two point five. There's going to a rapid pace. >> So more slew of announcement >> Very similar >> Don: Yes. >> to the cadence we've been seeing at Oracle and Amazon traditionally had started that trend. Larry couldn't even finish the keynote on Sunday because the announcement stream was so large >> No we have a, you'll see a constant string of releases on a, you know, a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. There's just a ton of stuff coming. We have a ton of features to add. We have a ton of interesting new services to add. >> So the pace is fast. You're running hard? >> Don: The pace is very fast. >> Well, congratulations and looking forward to following you guys and your success. Love the agile mindset. Love to see that cadence of shipping stuff, moving really, really fast and appreciate, >> Alright. >> you spending the time. >> Don: Thank you very much. >> Sharing your insights. The Cube live here at OpenWorld. You're watching The Cube. Back with more live coverage here in San Francisco after this short break. (softly intense techno music)