>>from around the globe. It's the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS Amazon Web services published. Public Sector Summit Online I'm John for your host with a great Gas Cube alumni Kate Goodall, Healthy in co founder and CEO, also known as the Halsey in house in the D C area. Kate, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Virtually >>you, too. Thanks for having me, John. >>We can't be there in person. Normally, we're in person by rain going to these events. We can't do it this year because of Cove in the Pandemic. But this topic that I'm proud to talk to you about is Bahrain Women intensive program and just diversity in the global tech scene in general. So first tell us what's going on with the 2021 by Rain. Women's initiative Intensive initiative. >>Yeah, absolutely. As you know, Housing Incubator has been running for about seven years now. We've welcomed during that time over 150 entrepreneurs through a full time fellowship program which you were there, John, you saw, you know It is a really unique program that includes residents in a ah house in Georgetown s O that people really get to sort of former community. But the full time residential program isn't the right fit preneurs. So we also offer these intensive housing incubator programs for early stage social entrepreneurs from different parts of the world in different industries and sectors. Um, a W s been an amazing partner both for the full time fellowship program on for many of these intensive, including one that was focused earlier this year on entrepreneurs, an opportunity zones in our very own city. Um, but this new intensive partnership is designed specifically to support tech oriented social enterprise startups that are founded by women and based in Bahrain s. So it's It's really nicely at this intersection of calcium goal off supporting entrepreneurs who are often underserved or underrepresented. And AWS is very clearly stated goal of diversifying leadership in tech. >>I was there last year in person Bahrain, and, uh, I went to the women's diversity um, breakfast and I'm like, This is exciting and I had to give up my seat. There was so many people, there was high demand eso I >>wanna >>ask you what >>is >>this program hoping to achieve the intensive initiative? >>Yeah. I mean, there's certain things that we're always seeking to achieve in supporting and serving sort of the brightest minds and the best ideas in social enterprise. On in many ways, this one is no different. Um, but we're really looking Thio Thio, find some incredible startups in Bahrain. Um, applications for the program start today. Andi will be measuring. You know, the success of the program on a number of factors, Aziz, we always do. You know, ultimately, it's the number of jobs that get created theme the quality and quantity of the impact of the startups Onda And ultimately, you know, revenue and dollars raised all of the things that you would measure a successful business by, um uh, s so we're just really excited to find some incredible ventures that fit really well in this in the selection criteria. Andi, we'll be looking thio. Everyone's help spread the word about this great opportunity. >>Congratulations on your new program. I wanna ask you specifically, if you could give some examples of the kinds of startups you're hoping to attract, so as you look at the candidates. What's gonna be the criteria you mentioned is a criteria What jumps off the page in your mind. >>Yeah. So we want people that really understand that. Why, you know, why are they starting that business on bond? Ideally, people that have a really good idea for a rapidly scaling tech startup that also has a double bottom line attached to it. So something whereby the business models succeeds and scales and achieves eso to with the impact that is inherent in that in that model, you know, some some examples from just passed cohorts at healthy. And, you know, we've had most recently, um, incredible entrepreneur that came out off the US prison system and was really interested in reducing recidivism and worked on a tech startup that allows families to communicate with incarcerated loved ones where through a tech platform where you can convert your text to a loved one into a postcard that then could be sent into the system because obviously people aren't allowed to communicate through cell phones when they're incarcerated s Oh, that's a good example of something where you know the profit and impact really scale themselves. Um, you know, similarly from just this. You know, recent cohorts, we had a, uh, founder who herself suffered from pulmonary pulmonary hypertension. And she created a really great wearable device that can attach to your ear. Looks just like an earring. It's quite fashionable, actually. I want one. And, um, it lets you know how your oxygen level is because she just didn't have access to something that was that easy and wearable, but needed to monitor her oxygen level. Turns out, that's actually really, ah, useful piece of technology during covert. So, you know, we're looking for people that are thinking about healthcare, thinking about the environment, thinking about education on decree, ating a sustainable business model that that will help them to scale that idea. >>I wanna get into the whole social entrepreneurship conversation. It's really great when I wanna unpack that, But let's stay on this program. Um, it's super exciting. How do people get involved? It's open, but there's some criteria. Um, you mentioned startups. You're looking for changing world double Bottom line. How do people get involved? >>Really excited. You asked that because I you know, I have some people that are watching can help us um certainly, uh, going to the home page of our website housing house dot or GTA. If anyone knows any great social entrepreneurs in Bahrain, please let them know and help us spread the word. Really happy to be working with AWS and startup Borane to do so. But we we want to, you know, make it as far and wide as possible. So both for people that are interested in applying to the program and also people that are interested in helping because we always pull together a vast network of mentors and advisors and investors to really make the programmers robustas possible, they should I would encourage everyone to reach out and get in touch either through the website or, uh at housing inspires on Social Media said that our team can get back to you >>for the question is how, um What? How will the selection process work and when will they be >>partnering with AWS and start up by rain? Thio select the best start up ventures. They'll be notified in December on by The program will begin virtually in January. >>And what are the winners get? They get money. Do they get mentoring? What can you talk >>about package, so every in computer program is a little bit different. But generally they all get, uh, some serious training and assigned mentor a specific skill. Siri's that's bespoke to that intensive, and those founders needs. But more than likely, this one will include, as as they all do, you know ways to plan Thio, acquire customers ways to improve your business model and make good projections ways to think about investment and how to understand. Um, investment bond, get investment should you need thio eso. It'll have all of that along with marketing and branding and how to measure impact. But then also some bespoke things. You know, once we know exactly what the founders needs are on but then very bespoke advisors and mentors in accordance with those needs >>and really nurturing that start up in that project to getting some traction, then hopefully track into some funding vehicles. I imagine right? >>Absolutely, absolutely, and access to D. C. S. You know, great landscape when it comes to this kind of thing, both in terms of sort of three institutions that air here and the investment that is here on do all of them will also, of course, receive a ws cloud computing credits and technical support, which we found to be profoundly helpful for all of our, um, tech startups or tech enabled startups. >>Yeah, I think that's one of the things that people don't realize that some free credits out there as well take advantage of those That's awesome. And I love how this ecosystem nurturing here. When I was in Bahrain, I noticed that very young demographics changing demographics. Diversity is huge. But like here in North America and all around the world, the lack of diversity in the tech sector has been a big conversation is always happening. Thes, impact driven businesses actually consult two things you're doing. A program that impacts the diversity as well as solves the problem for diversity. Talking about double Bottom line. Can you talk about this diversity? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, e think you know, it's interesting because we all know that diverse teams out perform. We all understand the imperative to do that, but you're right, it's it's not just a US problem or Bahrain problem. It's a global problem, you know. And I think one of the ways to solve it is to go early because we know that women founders and founders of color and other marginalized founders, you know, start businesses roughly at the same rate. But they generally don't grow as big, and they don't, um, uh often get us much investment. In fact, the investment numbers are quite stark. In terms of who receives venture capital eso. We know that there's a lot left to disrupt, but we also know that if we're going to solve the problems that we all face right now that we need the whole population involved in solving it. So we're really interested in in in creating a much better ecosystem everywhere for for women. Founders on DWI know that that requires the support of everyone, regardless of gender and background and lived experience. Eso it is it is an imperative. But it's also a tremendous opportunity, you know, to get more people involved on Bahrain's got some incredible women and some great, uh, resource is and pieces of the ecosystem already in place. Thio, I think really be a leader in this area. >>Yes. Start up our rain to you mentioned that they have a great program. They're they're really there to help the entrepreneur, and I think the key here and I want to get your reaction to this is that not only is that important to get off the ground and having someone to be around and being a community that fosters the kind of innovation, thinking and getting started, great. But you've had a very successful program. The Halsey in house housing house dot org's as you mentioned, the u R L. You've had success, but you've been physically in D. C. What have you learned from the house? Your house success that you're applying that could be applied for others? Toe learn. >>Yeah, there's there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, we've had a Zai mentioned about 150 you know, Fellows come through our doors and they've gone on to create over 1800 jobs around the world. Received $150 million in funding, which for early stage social social ventures is a really good mark of success. Andi have gone on to impact the lives of more than 2.5 million people around the world, so I hope that this program is that you know will be able to help empower these founders, um, in Bahrain to do exactly those things and to be able to scale the adventures to create that impact. You know, we've learned a lot about you know what these startups need. Um, you know, that goes beyond just sort of the the office space and sort of traditional incubator offerings that they need a really strong community around them to celebrate their successes and also to help them with their lows. Entrepreneurship is a very rocky journey, and so that community becomes really, really important. Eso we know a lot about building, you know, supportive, nurturing community. We also know that you know, women when they go to get investment, are going to receive 70% mawr prevention questions. And this is even from women venture capitalists, right? They just venture capitalists are creatures of habit, and they generally will just look at the patterns, successes and trends that they've had and repeat those. So they're going to be looking for the same types of people. Are they funded in the past, which are traditionally young white males and eso? We know that just by virtue of the system that we all live in on DWhite. It's implanted in all of us that women are going to receive more questions about the risk of their business many, many more than they will about the opportunity. So how do we train women for that landscape? You know, how do we train them to answer the questions about the risk realistically and fairly but pivot so that they get the same opportunities as a male entrepreneur, perhaps to answer questions about the ceiling as well as the floor. >>Yeah, and addresses trade up and understand the criteria and having that confidence. And I think that the great news is that we're all changing and we're all open to it. And there's more funds now like this and your >>leadership. E love that point, John. I think, you know, I think that everyone's eyes are open right, and I can say that sort of it with a really strong sense of conviction. That, like 2020 is is a great year for acknowledging this problem and for I think a lot of joint motivation to really properly address it. So I'm actually feeling really optimistic about it, >>and we're at a cultural crossroads. Everyone kind of knows that you're seeing it play out on the big stage of the world on again. Your leadership has been doing this, and I want to get your thoughts on this because you mentioned entrepreneurship, the ups and downs. Some call it a rollercoaster highs and lows. You have great days, and you have really, really bad days. And it's even compounded when you're not in the pattern matching world of what people are seeing. If you're a woman or under verse, a minority or group, I gotta ask you the question around mental health because one of the things, especially with co vid, is having that community. Because the ups and downs swings are important that people maintain their confidence, and mentors and community add value there. Can you talk about that important piece of the equation because it's it plays a big role, often not talked about much? Um, it is tough now more than ever than ever before, but still not enough. This community there, it's >>having support. We can, you know, we talk about it a lot of healthy and what people need to prioritize their mental health as they grow a business. And ultimately, if you're not doing a good job of that. Your business will not succeed because your team would be healthy and you're just it compounds. Um, so it's really imperative. And it does take a toll on founders on entrepreneurs, I think in in higher degrees. And it does in the general population because a small crack can become a chasm if people are not careful. Andi, everyone knows even if you're super passionate about something, putting in 20 hours a day, every day continuously is eventually going to catch up with you, right? So you have to create healthy habits from the beginning for you and your team on board. And certainly during covert we've seen some of those things exacerbated due to isolation. So that community peace becomes really, really important. I don't think she would mind me saying so. I'm going Thio mention that one of our previous entrepreneurs and Yang brilliant, brilliant woman actually did a great piece. Uh, you can just google and Yang entrepreneur depression, mental health and and it will come up for you, but just a really candid expose on what it is like. Thio be an entrepreneur that perhaps struggles with with mental health >>Yeah, it's super important. And I gotta say, I really love your work. I've always been an admirer of the Halsey in Mission and the people behind it, the halcyon house. And now you're taking it to buy rain under with an intensive kind of program. It's a global landscape. Final word, Kate. What should people know about this program? Summarize it real quick. >>We're just super happy to be reaching out and supporting a greater number off talented founders from the Middle East with Although Bahrain on our partners started, Borane and AWS have to offer. You know, we we love to expand our work to serve more and more entrepreneurs. And we couldn't be more excited to support these women. >>We're an upward better time now than ever. It's gonna be a big change happening. Big cultural change. Your part of it. Thank you for joining me. >>Thank you, John. >>Great to see you >>really appreciate it. >>Thank you. I'm John for your here. The cube. Virtual covering A W s public sector online. Thanks for watching

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering upgrade twenty twenty, The NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >>Welcome back. I'm stupid a man. And this is the Cubes coverage of Upgrade twenty twenty. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program someone that watch the Cube for a long time. But first time on the program. Simon Walsh. He is the new CEO of NTT America's Simon. Great to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks very much. Too good to be here. All right. See, >>A Zai mentioned your your previous companies that you've worked for are ones that the Cube and Cube audience are well aware of. Matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years. But if you could maybe let's start with just a little bit of your background. And as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO, so you know, what's it like coming into a role like this? You know, during the situation that we're all faced with in twenty twenty. >>Yeah, Thank you. I mean, my background is really in, You know, the platforms that enable the customers Thio run their technologies. Andi, Uh, you know, I spent some of my time in Europe and the media on then latterly the last five plus years in the Americas. I have to say I really enjoy It's a much better environment. If I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's, ah really dynamic place to work. I worked with companies headquartered from Europe running America's, and I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas, running some of the European businesses. So I've crossed the continent's if you like. I recently joined NTT. I have to say, you know, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly, you know, interviews and due diligence because you want to make sure that, you know, you're you're buying into a company that, you know, number one, you can have ah, cultural compatibility with, but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that consult for, you know, the business agenda of the markets. So that's really a bit about my background and then, you know, joining. I mean, I literally joined last week of June, so my whole time has bean through, locked down in terms of employment. It's been very unique. Taking on a new post, exclusively remote. Andi I was a bit worried, you know, at a human level, just, you know, how do you connect with people? What I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet ah, lot more people in person because you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So that's certainly helped, you know. And I've done my, uh, activities of meeting clients. Eso they've been very amenable to connecting talking to our business partners and spending, you know, considerable amount of time with my colleagues, uh, in the Americas and around the world. Andi, it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you probably physically closer because you're on a screen and you probably like twenty four inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room you'd be the other side of the table. So it's been unique, but so far so good. >>Well, yeah, absolutely. The the new abnormal is we. We have sometimes say what? We're all usedto looking in the screens all day talking to various people there. Uh, the impact on business, though, has been, uh, you know, obviously ah, lot of different things, depending on the company. But that discussion of digital transformation a few years ago it was like, Oh, I don't know if it's really is it a buzzword? But that the spotlight that's been shown here in twenty twenty is what Israel and what is not leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because, boy in twenty twenty if we needed to react fast, so help bring us inside a little bit. And your time there, the discussion you're having with customers, that adoption moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and house NTT helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond toe the realities that we see today. >>Yeah, so you're right into I mean, digital disruption has been ongoing for multiple years. Way used to call it technology and change, and now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in twenty twenty, You know, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed, uh, in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations understanding. You know what it is to modernize processes, you know, modernize the customer experience on Then they're finding that actually, they don't need in a board room and discuss, you know, the performance of the business so they now need to have distributed access to data on. I think the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature off the workforce. Andi. Obviously there's always been a filled workforce, and we've had systems, crm systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have toe think about our supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the P and L. And you know all of the activities that business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce, and it's quite abnormal. And I think what we've learned is where is the data on how doe I amalgamate data from distributed systems. And so I see. And we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how doe I join data from system a two system F in a distributed manner, most importantly, securely timely on in A in an interface that is usable on it sounds really easy is like Oh, great, yeah, it's just two different data points. Connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of technical debt, legacy systems and platforms Very expensive and significant historical investments on those things Don't modernize themselves overnight. Quite often. The dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So we then end up layering on, you know, new technology. So you know what I'm seeing on in digital transformation is really about. How do we handle distributed data Distributed decision making on how we do that in a secure manner on through an interface that is, uh, user friendly? >>Yeah, way. Obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. You know, the joke. I've had everybody came into twenty twenty with Okay, here. Here's what I'm gonna do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have, and we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on Number one priority. I still hear it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there, and you've mentioned it multiple times. Its security, you know, is absolutely front and center Still. How overall, though, How are your customers? You know, the c X So sweet. How are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center? Obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere. Telemedicine, uh, you know, teach and learn from anywhere have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are gonna probably stay with us. Uh, you know, for the long term, >>Absolutely. We've definitely seems Thio customers re prioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this, a za consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment. And we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen is a prioritization has been How do we get our information to our users? Whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee, you know, there's examples where there's lots of companies who are saying they've got, like, online detail, right. But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores. But the stores couldn't open. So what you've seen is a re prioritization to say, Well, when we look out inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in that the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores? And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale, ready for distribution on. Then we've got inventory in a store retail ready for consumer consumption. What? We don't want that to be separate Infantry. We want that to be holistic on. Then how do we enable any any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup, which we didn't used to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order? But the inventory may come from, you know, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a storied inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got it's got some freight cost, but I've also got some other efficiency savings, and I'm reducing my working capital in my inventory expense. So we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it. This word distributed is very simple in principle, but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So that's some of the prioritization we've seen. >>Um, you mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is wait. If I was doing a corporate network update, that might not be the first thing. You know, we we Absolutely. We've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the Internet, but the network is so critically important, everybody from home is, you know, dealing with Children doing their zoom classrooms while we're trying to dio video meetings. Um, NTT obviously has a strong, uh, you know, network component to what? Its businesses help us understand the services that are important there. What? What? You're working with customers. And how has this kind of transformed, uh, some of those activities? >>Yeah, Yeah, sure. Thank you. You're so right. I mean, I have to say I just like thio, pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home but also home schooling in parallel. Uh, kids are fled the nest, you know, they're working for themselves now, so we don't have the extra activity of home schooling. But I can really have a lot of respect her colleagues who are trying to do both. It's a real fine art on. We've seen a lot of actually just talking of re prioritization. We've seen a lot of companies, including ourselves. You know, say to our colleagues, Look after your Children home, school them do everything you can to support your families on, then get to your work So that re prioritization. Justin behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do that flexibility to. You know, work is something you do not somewhere you go on. Therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around. You know your needs is a family, so that's one prioritization we've seen at, actually. But to your point on the network, it is quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud on demand subscription services on Actually, the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network and its historically been the least cloudlike that you could possibly imagine Because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a band with value you still need to specify. You know, the number of devices you get too attached to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing the network as a service. I mean, we talk about I as has SAS. But what happened toe now, as I mean really, did we just think that everything was about computing software? The network is the underpin er on DSO. Really? We see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service enabling customers tohave dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events, you know, a lot of customers are now doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference on. Do you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps a back office process that, quite frankly, wait a few days so we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network of the service solutions. You know, the Cloud Network. And I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area on then. The other area has just been the phenomenal ship to I p voice on soft bone, actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using you know, teams or Skype or Google hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism on. Then you know, we're providing all the underlying transportation layer. But as I p voice, you know, that creates a much more integrated collaboration. Experience on git creates a cost saving because you're taking away classic voice services. >>Yeah, Simon Boy, I'm excited for that. I I remember when I got my first BlackBerry and they were trying to sell me some things. I'm like, Wait, this is an Internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there and of course you know it's taking taking it. The last dozen years. If If Ghana certain far, but and we always joke, it's like smartphones. We don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So, uh, the the data and the network are so critically important, something I want to turn Thio, you know, upgrade twenty twenty. You know what? I'm excited about this. You know, we've talked about, you know, the major impacts of what's happened in twenty twenty, and we're looking at the here and now. But it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So we'd love to hear from your standpoint, some of the areas. What's exciting? You what's exciting? That we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. >>Yeah. Thank you. Strewn E. I think what I like about Aravind is the investment that we make to work with, You know, scientific community, academia, really invest in, you know, forward looking future proofing, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, you know, some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products, and some of it doesn't. But it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at you know where technology is going. I think the areas that particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of quantum computing. This is, uh, you know, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of quantum computing in, you know, some labs and Cem academia centers on really to understand, how can we take advantage of that? But I think if you then say and you take another area that we're exploring through the event Biosciences, if you then take the two together and you think Okay, how do we take quantum computing on? We take Biosciences on you think about health care, and then you think about the pandemic. You know? Are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, understand, accelerate testing, and then really contribute to, you know, the health and welfare of society. Andi, I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So that's a specific topic that I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space quantum computing as well as you know, Biosciences. And I'd say, you know, one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain how it serves the business is really the area of Blockchain. I think this is, um, intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed Thio overcome the topic of my brain yet, So I'm still working on it on. Then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology. Now, on our data is available how we secure it, How we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely going to be critical. You see an increasing push nationally on globally to ensure that there is, you know, security of data on. I think the subject of cryptography and how we go forward with, you know, beyond one hundred and twenty eight bit is gonna be a very difficult and critical subjects. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. >>Wonderful. Simon, I wanna give you the final word from update. Great. Twenty twenty. >>Yeah, thanks to you. Just thanks very much, Thio. Anybody that's attending what you'll find through various workshops. There's lots of insight from our strategic partners from research scientists from academia from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. You know, we always value your feedback. So please tell us what we could do to improve the content to help you with your businesses. Onda, We look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually >>well. Simon Walsh, Thank you so much. Great. Having a conversation and glad to have you in our cube alumni now, >>thank you very much to have a good day. >>Alright, Stay tuned. More coverage from upgrade twenty twenty. I'm still minimum. And thanks. As always, for watching the cube. Yeah,

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 here in London, England. We're gonna be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, Bala Kuchibhotla is the General Manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella who recently joined Nutanix, is Vice President of Products at Nutanix. Both of you been up on stage, Greg was talking about Carbon and cloud native, and of course Era is the databases of service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Alright, so look, developers. You know, we were thinking back, you know, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers! Balmer had it right, and style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. You know, my background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is, you know, developers really work from the application down. It's like that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because you know I look at Nutanix, you know, at it's core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from like really the hyper-scale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Bala, you want to start? >> Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We cannot simply its storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as service. Obviously if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so they can present the cloud to developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for quite some time, we're not expanding the services to other things, the platform, the platform as service. Now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption. That these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud for you. US developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption. They lack ability, that the ability you are trying to do, easy tools, (mumbling), and S3s, that kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APS for our Nutanix that you can spin up a VM, spin up a database, spin up a storage and then do what you want to do kind of stuff. So that's the natural journey for that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, Greg? >> Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers, and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up what would be a pretty complex environment from a three tier application with a robust database, an app tier, anything else you might have on the storage side, spin it up, break it down, and with your CICD pipeline you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So we look at doing is, you know, recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed, you know, on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. >> So looking at, you know, one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really, you know, need to go through a purchasing process, other than credit card maybe paid for themselves in the beginning. So you know, low friction is really the key word here. So I'm wondering, you know, looking at the Nutanix, the IT ops perspective, how are you kinda bring that low friction into the developer world? >> Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I am seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People doing silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their compute kind of stuff. There's a pressure on the IT ops to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public a lot. As simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the IT ops, the DB ops, the traditional DB ops inner ring, they are understanding the need that, hey well, we gotta be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming that kinda stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kinda stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators, now we're exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers. Essentially the developers. >> Greg, up on stage you talked about cloud native, and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit, and you know, we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so, you know, why isn't this just saying, "No, no, no, we can be cloud native, too." >> Fair point, and I think we're not alone in that as well, in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, our cloud native architecture within the private data center Say look, really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right, and that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless, ephemeral infrastructure. You're not upgrading things, you know, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that, that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right, 'cause that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators are really going through, right, so everything's pets, not much cattle. We're really trying to change that quite a bit, and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're seeing is, it's not so much us trying to sell this it's more like hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on prem in our private data center where we have all of our data, and the other services that we need to interact with, like, that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that mass of data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. >> So one other thing, you mentioned pets versus cattle. One of the things I've been seeing from, you know, an IT ops perspective is you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're gonna do manual interaction, and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering, you know, in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience, and you know, towards management or monitoring, or backup stuff like that? >> So, you know, a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes, right, as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add onto that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there, or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that, so I mentioned Epoch on stage, right, so it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus. So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes, like auto-scaling. I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, you know, we look at doing things like, again it's early in Kubernetes, but snapshotting from within Kubernetes. Right, so if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot. Underneath our storage layer will take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. >> I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This pets versus cattle is standardization, right, like we're talking about it. In typical, old legacy enterprises there are let's take the example of databases. Like, every application team has their own databases they are trying to pass, they're all trying to do management around it kind of stuff. When we do a couple of servers, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. And so like this is one of the biggest companies that we talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the Era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize these database environments for on premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 pull the node to PSE5, you can only create databases with whatever the software the public cloud guys are doing it. But on premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix, Era, and this products will come into. We allow to people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. So that is what I call standardization at their customer terms, that's what we're trying. >> And let me add to that, though. It also brings in this convenience, 'cause not only is it coming up with standardize, but we've made it even more convenient, right, because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're gonna get a standard configuration for what that is, and so you made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. >> Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary, you know. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jassy was sparing back with Larry Ellison, you know, at re:Invent this week, but you know, we've been watching the growth of things like Postgres, and lot of these changes, you know, Era sits clearly in that space. So what do you seeing from customers, you know, the modernization of applications is, you know, what I call the long pole in the tent. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I said we usually want to first, you know, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, public cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. You know, database tends to be, it's the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so there are two class of applications that we see. This space is completely green field We are starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud native databases that's where the public cloud can kind of try to help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud native stack that we talk about, the cloud native database, is not going to the game. Like you really need to think about how do you kind of take these big, giant databases that are there with Oracles, and DBTools, that kind of stuff but give the cloud-like experience, right? So the actually very difficult game for any public cloud, that's why you don't see rack provisioning and a dot list is still not there, or even if JCP natively. Oracle does that but little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on premise, that's my humble take on this, right. But how do you build, how do you make this gray area I call it a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centered kind of stuff? That's where Era actually tries to play. It has two roles that, if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you, or if you have a green field then we can get you directly onto the cloud native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help. These are the three things that we try to do through Era kinda of stuff, yeah. >> So looking forward, you know, we're starting out with databases, you know, making that simple, making that small so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg, so what's the future for Nutanix in, you know, enabling other services, other cloud-like services on a Nutanix platform going forward? >> In addition to databases. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right, so we have that in storage for a long time, that makes things easy with databases. We have a standard client talking to standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're gonna want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a defacto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You'll get Pub/Sub with Kafka APIs, Druid. There's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of defacto standards, so really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and how do we really work the the community to establish those as open standards. 'Cause we really want, you know, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack, it's like hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard, open APIs, and then developers get what they need which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. >> Into some-I-tab we have easy to equal end, which is AHV, we have EBS equal end, we have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equal end, which is called Buckets, we have database RDS equal end, we have Era, and now we are going with content as which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers, to say that man, it's all ecosystem, it's not like one piece, single piece It's not this compute, it's not this storage, but it is an ecosystem of services that we need to kind of predict. >> Want to just come back to what we were talking beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers, and how much direct developer engagement is it? Like, you know, is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows. But maybe if you could give us some commentary on that. >> Yeah, I can start that, it's a path, right? So currently we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are gonna be on the IT operations side, and so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit, and I think that you'll that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with you know, through the APIs like they have Era. So for instance, if IT has deployed Era internally, then if I want a database I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. And you'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. >> Just to give you an example, right, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champaign, right. So we are operating a private cloud and we are exposing our APIs to all our developers. Today, if someone wants a database in Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say I want a database. Right, that's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right. That's where we are going with our customers, too, hey, here is how you build your private cloud, here is how you expose all your service end points for different services, and your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a building aspect of it, that's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers, how do they charge meter, that kind of stuff that people will talk about today. >> You know, I definitely heard when I talked to all the product teams, especially everything in Zai cloud, you know, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're gonna be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the Cube-Con show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us. Bala, pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're gonna be back with more coverage here. From Nutanix .Next 2018 in London, I'm Stu Miniman and Joep Piscaer is my cohost. Going to be do a Dutch session in a second, so be sure to stay with that. First foreign language interview on theCUBE, and thank you for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube, covering .NEXT conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. Or where the doer of deeds, could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Whose face is marked by dust, and sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errors, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error in shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end of the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Those words by Theodore Roosevelt were in this morning's keynote by Dr. Brene Brown. Welcome to theCube's coverage of Nutanix.NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with Keith Townsend here to break down, give our critiques as well as understand that Nutanix, while they are a public company, been striving and succeeding greatly. 5500 people here at this conference, very enthusiastic, great party last night, so Keith, we talked about it, our show opened yesterday, been your first show, got to talk to a bunch of customers, talked to a bunch of partners. Give us impressions and overall experience. >> So you know, you can't go to a show like this and not get hero numbers. 70,000 people in the Nutanix community program. 61,000 certified individuals. Customers making statements such as, Nutanix, humble company, Nutanix, not feeling entitled to the sale. Needing to work for the dollar. Customers extremely excited about the announcements, the direction of the company for key core areas I saw from a technology perspective, in which they made some really aggressive announcements and bets. So you know what, this has been a very high energy conference. >> Yeah, absolutely, talk about, from a financial standpoint, they're doin' well. Wall Street's been rewarding them greatly for the move to move to software only. Company's over nine billion dollars in market cap. Amazing. Had to go for a thousand customers a quarter. Very good for the space that they're playing in. Things like their file system, AFS, their fastest growing products. Building on that base infrastructure, but then yes, as you said, bold direction, they've got the kind of three axises that they're trying to build on. Build out HyperVage's support, build out cloud support. They're going to talk about how we think, where Nutanix fits in this cloud world. Building out their software portfolio. Where do they have IP, where are they growing? They've done four acquisitions so far in the software space. Some of those are starting to show through. We did interviews with the former CEO of Minjar and it NetSill, and- >> Bot Metric. >> Yeah, yeah that's the Netsill Bot Metric piece there. So products that are now, some of them are shipping. And as well as getting some vision. They had their first SAS product in Beam. Really interesting, something that really was targeted at AWS and Azure. Not the data center, but they're trying to make that hybrid-hybrid message as well as giving some of the vision. Nutanix Era is a big directional piece. Project Sherlock. Of course the big brains here working on that. Really interested in Edge and IOT. So a lot of pieces there, what's your take? >> You know what? I think I'm a bit overwhelmed actually. Which is a great thing, you look at COM was over the past couple of months, their Com platform was evened out by adding micro-segmentation. Which, against their biggest competitor VMware was a essential piece. They've been unabashful with going after it. You know what, AHV can now compete head-to-head with VMware just as long as you don't need memory over commit, and metro clustering that AHV, the term that they use in "game on." So Nutanix is, you know we talked to Duraj, a couple of years on theCube, asked him, you know what, is Nutanix a platform company? He say, you know what, no, (mumbles) too humble to accept that mantle of being a platform company, there's a lot of work to do. You look out onto the show floor, 80 partners and sponsors, who are all offering solutions tied to AHV. Which we talked about a little bit. A lot of adoption, but it doesn't seem like there's much VMware. Market penetration and stealing customers from VMware as much as HyperV. There're a lot of customers we talked to we said, you know we tried HyperV on Nutanix, not so much so we went to AHV. >> Quick point, and I felt a few years ago, the conversation wasn't about HyperV when you talked about Microsoft. It wasn't the, for years it was, when will it catch up to what VMware's doing? VMware's still dominant in the space, customers here, and lots of 'em are usin' Vmware. Yes, there's that tension between Vmware and Nutanix, but Nutanix, do they poke and prod a little bit at some things? Yes, but at the show, very much focusing on what they're doing, and focusing on their customers, not sending pot shots or anything like that. But when it comes to Microsoft, you're right Keith, there were a number of customers I talked to that were like, well in a Microsoft shop, and we know what applications used to live on VMware. Number one thing was always Microsoft. Many of them, I tried HyperV, didn't really like the experience. And therefore it was a smooth path to go over to AHV. Lot's of customers that are doing both VMware and AHV and sorting that out. And it's like oh, well over time, if Nutanix becomes 80, 90, even some of them gettin' towards 100% of heir deployment, AHV becomes a bigger piece of the portfolio. >> And you know, we thought that this whole multi-HyperVisor argument was over. Like, you know what, just go to one HyperVisor. A lot of Nutanix customers are showing that multi-HyperVisor is a legit way to go that we haven't ran with anyone who said, No, we're having management pains, running AHV side-by-side with VM or Vspare. >> I would like to see from Nutanix, more partnerships with Microsoft though. You talk Azure, absolutely huge growth, number two out there. Yes, they support it, but you know, of course they have much more showing at the Amazon show. They've got a strong partnership with Google. Got to highlight that with the Brian Stevens interview. And know that later this year, as Zai really starts to roll out, that we will see much more of that. But Azure, not only in the public cloud piece, but Azure's stack is starting to grow. I've been talking to Lenovo, HP, Adele, Cisco, all of them have pent-up demands, service writers that are starting to roll at Azure's stack. And while Azure's stack really is kind of a closed ecosystem there, I think there is opportunity for Nutanix to play in there, I expect them to hear from the customers who'd love them to do more with Microsoft. We heard from customers that they'd actually love to hear Nutanix do more with Redhat, and in general be a deletega system, yes, show floor, it's growing, it's vibrant but absolutely, it's always, what more? >> OF course, we always, and I think we get our friends at Nutanix always pokes us about staying positive. But it is a positive, they're a software company now. And as a software company, you have to integrate with other software company services. The Azure stack thing, while it's mainly a hardware play for companies like Dale, Lenovo, Fujitsu, there has to be software integration. The folks with the Google and Nutanix partnership, did a really great job of doing push-button, at least showin' us on stage, push-button deployments of VM's, from Zai to Nutanix instances in the cloud. This is Nutanix in the cloud. That won't probably play with Azure and Azure Stack. So Nutanix really needs to figure out a way to get into that relationship with Microsoft. >> Yeah, true simplicity takes genius, is a quote that I had out of this show in the early years. And Nutanix will make a bold claim. Oh, database migration, we're going to make that really easy. Well, show me (laughs) Anybody that's worked with databases- >> That's like sayin' DR is easy. Yeah, gettin' the stores from one point to another one is easy. Processes, not so much. >> Some of that Project Sherlock, oh yeah all that tensor flow, cumbrineties, functions of the service, we're going to make it push-button easy so that we'll make that invisible. How much is a distraction, what's in the weeds? You know, the networking, there's so many pieces in there that love the vision. Of course customers want it simplified, but we want to talk to the customers, and understand what works, what still needs to be tweaked, where do they have to build out some services, partnerships, even more than they've done today to go further, what have you been seeing and hearing? >> So, Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company. I've poked at the whole cloud marketing term. Matter of fact, on Twitter, one of the, I'll read this. Cloud really, no AI, no databases or severs. No server-less, does that even, doesn't even have a presence at Cubrineties events. Fake cloud story for IT, ah! So you know what, let's pick that apart a little bit. DV as a service, they announced basically yesterday, that's there. AI, Satium Gatupum said a really nice story with Sherlock there, absolutely looking at it. Cubrineties integration, ACS, 2.0 will come out the gate as a Cubrineties manage distribution. They announced Zai integration with Cubrineties and push-button. Now you may pick on the cloud part. Nutanix still very much talks to the infrastructure group. Their customers are the infrastructure group, and you can't talk cloud without having a relationship with application developers. So I think the next step as Nutanix matures, these offerings on, their cloud offerings, is that they have to start to have a deeper relationship. They have to go side-by-side with their IT sponsors and organizations to start to have conversations with application developers. >> Yeah, and I love the online, the cloud-eraderie if you will, out there. Well, we understand, this is the architecture of the future. Where it should go, I love hangin' out with the cloud native crew. But for me, it goes back to talking to their customers. And when the customers, if they're like here's what we've done, here's the proof as to how I get faster time to market, how I'm accelerating my development teams insight. I'm creating, one of the interviews we did, IT as business, is how we run things. These are real digital transformation stories. Impressive stuff, and it's cloud. And it's not virtualization with a little layer on top. It's real change inside customers, and Nutanix, I'll say, as a platform to help us get from where I've been, to where I'm going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Nutanix customers are not listening to the cloud-eraderie. They absolutely love the platform. You know Stu, I don't think I've run into a negative customer at the show. I haven't run into a customer that says, you know what, Nutanix isn't meeting my need in X or Y area. Home Depot won the innovation award at the show. Then Home Depot is a forward thinking customer, truly embracing parts of the platform. I'm sure there's some cloud native pieces. >> They're a big Google cloud platform customer. One of Pivotal's big one on GCP. So absolutely, and we have, I've talked to a number of customers big on Amazon, developer shops, absolutely public cloud to piece of it. Yeah, if the criticism I should have, I always look and say, if I said public cloud and private cloud, where's your center of gravity? Of course Nutanix is going to go, leaning a little bit more towards the data centers, hosted service providers. That's where they live today. But they're not blind to it, they're embracing it. They have a full SAS product, they're going to be expanding that. They are software at their core, distributed architectures where they're going. >> You know Stu, one of our favorite comments is that, company X likes to move, moves at the pace of the CIO. I think it's safe to say, Nutanix is a little bit faster than the CIO. And they're enabling the old stuff. You know what, let's make that push-button easy, and as we're looking, have a eye to the future, looking at the new stuff, let's see how we can get there, push-button easy. There's a lot of work to do. But I think they're making some really interesting and probably the right moves for their customer base. >> Aright well, Keith, first of all, I want to thank you for all of your help here this week. The CTO advisor, always great to dig in with customers. Really get in, it's been exciting to watch you kind of get to know a little bit more about this. I've had the pleasure of tracking Nutanix in the really early days, been at every one of these shows. It is a great community, kudos to Nutanix. Thank you for sponsoring us, and if not familiar, if you look at the bottom of the videos we're playin' right now, we mention who sponsors, we're tryin' to be transparent. Keith and I though, we're out here in the field. If you have questions for us, or you know, want us to ask something, or question what we're doing, hit us up, we're really easy to reach on Twitter. Always happy for feedback from the community. And as always, check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows, everywhere we're going. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watchin' theCube's presentation from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in New Orleans, and see you at lots more shows. (futuristic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube, covering Dot Next Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here at the Cube in New Orleans, the Nutanix Dot Next Conference. Joining me is Keith Townsend, going wall-to-wall with interviews for two days. And going to dig into some really geeky techy stuff, Micro segmentation and the like. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, Harjot Gill, who is the Senior Director of product and engineering at Nutanix and Rajiv Mirani, who's the CTO of Cloud Platform. Thank you both for joining us. >> Both: Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rajiv you've been with Nutanix for a bit, so we're going to get Harjot first. So we beat four acquisitions that Nutanix has made in the software space in the last year or so. One of them was Netsil. >> Harjot: Yes. >> So bring us back. You were and are the CEO of the Netsil Group. Tell us, kind of, a why of the company, size of the team, things like that. >> That's good yeah, so previously, as I was co-founder and CEO of Netsil, which I don't know whether you noticed, is listen spelled backwards. And, essentially, it was like microservices analytics platform and the core technology of Nexus was, where designers at University of Pennsylvania in the research group. That's where most of my team came from. It's a really small team, like just 10 engineers, who took on this like very interesting challenge in the industry as micro services were taking off, applications were, like, ported to modern platforms, like kubernetes. We saw an opportunity to take, like, a network centric approach in doing performance analysis and liability analysis. And the product that we built is very interesting. It can be thought of as, like, Google Maps for your cloud applications just like Splunk, in the past, was Google search for data center. So we came up with this concept where you can, like, visualize different abstractions and different virtualization layers of your application delivery. And that was our product. >> Alright, Rajiv, we've been talking about the, really, expansion of services that you're offering. You know, security and networking, obviously a big space. So first of all, not not a Stanford team that you brought in but University of Pennsylvania. Explain a little bit for us justification, how Netsil fits in with the Nutanix portfolio. >> Yeah, the Netsil Technology is unique in many different ways and we actually see a lot of different applications for it. The core product that they have today, the way they do performance monitoring by staying just on the network, not installing any host agents. It's pretty unusual. It's something that we really liked about the technology. The fact that they can do this at layer seven can actually look at application data to deep packet inspection at line speed. It's even more impressive. And they really build at the scale out architecture based on Harjot's research work. We looked at that and we said, "hey look, this can be used for performance monitoring, it can be used for application discovery, it can be used for security operations." There's just so many different directions we can take this in. And it's a great team that's built it with a relatively small number of people. We want these guys to be working with us not not as a separate company. And it moved very quickly. The acquisition happened quite quickly. We talked a little bit this morning about how they're going to use it for micro segmentation but there's many other use cases we see coming down the pike. >> So let's talk a little bit about the enterprise of applicability. You know, when you guys looked at it, you mainly looked at containers and the challenges of a micro, i'm sorry, of multi services and basically twelve fact applications. >> Harjot: Yeah. >> How is that applicable to the typical enterprise, which 90% of their applications are modern lifts. Same capability? What what capabilities are you bringing to Bear for traditional application? >> It's pretty applicable everywhere because network is a very stable source of truth, like what remains constant in the legacy as well as in the new world is your TCP/IP stack. And it's a very stable source of truth to tap into. So one of the value proposition that Netsil had with an offer very, like, the early enterprise customers that we signed up, was helping them migrate from this monolithic architectures to micro services. And their existing tools on the market, if you look at APM tools or even the logging tools, were inadequate when taking them on this journey. And you can think of Netsil as a very pervasive solution. I mean, the analogy that I usually give people is, like drones versus troops on the ground. Where Netsil can quickly set up, like a breadth of coverage in any environment, whether it's like Legacy or micro services, you are covered. And and then once you find issues in your environment with security issues or performance issues, you can systematically drill in. Either add more instrumentation creating or add policies with micro segmentation. That was the whole idea. So there was a gap in the market for this kind of a tool. >> So let's talk about integration of Nutanix. One of the, what I'm calling, first principles for Nutanix is, push button one click easy. >> [Harjot And Rajiv] Yes. >> What does the Netsil application look like in a Nutanix environment to the Nutanix administrator? >> So let's take the micro segmentation example again, right. So today, if you were to micro segment an existing application, it's pretty hard to know where to begin. So Netsil described it as a hairy problem but we know he likes hair. But what Netsil does is it takes all the data it's gathering from the network and it gives you all this visibility into how every part of your application is interacting with each other. You can group it in different ways, so it's not just about VMs talking to Vms. If you have a micro services based application, that's actually very little value. You really want, which services are talking to each service or even more, which service tiers are talking to which service tiers. But gathering all that data, we can actually fully automate the creation of micro segmentation policies for existing applications. So today what we saw was more of a manual thing. We've set it up previously. It's just that we haven't enough time to do integration yet. You expect that to become completely automated. Similarly with the remediation stuff, the troubleshooting stuff. We have it integrated with the Netsil technology, with the machine learning things that we have been working on. Once we do that, we can explain a lot more automated insights into your applications, integrated alert system, integrated with our metrics and stat systems. So a lot of work to do but a lot of potential for this technology, I think. >> So yeah, so it actually does solve this chicken and an egg problem, as Rajiv said, with actually making micro segmentation operational by first discovering these ground field apps and then suggesting policies, right? And all the goodness of Netsil will be brought on to, like, products like Prism, where out-of-the-box, Netsil can provide visibility and metrics for workloads such as VDI and all the packaged applications and all the Mongo Db and all of the stuff that is hosted on top of Nutanix platform and selling it to the same ID ops. >> Harjot, the space you're playing in is really changing so so fast. >> Harjot: Yes it is. >> Talk about micro segmentation and containers and serverless and the like. What, at its core, will allow your product to be able to stay up with the pace of change? >> So the code of the product, as I mentioned, I mean, it's network based, so one of the things, like, you get with that is, like, it's a very stable source of truth. So your languages keep evolving. So in if you look at the, I mean, this mind-boggling introduction of, like, open source technologies into enterprise environments, which you don't control what languages they are written in. And your developers are like picking up the latest and greatest tools. So in that world the core of the technology, which is like network based, still works the same and that allows us to be ,like, really future-proof this thing here. >> Languages of frameworks change. The network protocols are much more stable. >> Yet, to some people's chagrin, the protocols don't change. So let's talk a little bit about products and overlap of products. One of the, I think, confusing points, or can be confusing, is where Netsil fits in when it comes to Comm and overall to Zai. Where, where's the interaction and overlap or what's the relative? >> Yeah, so you can think of every workload in the cloud as a coup de loop, observe, orient, decide, and act. Now what Comm helps the customer is to like act faster, right. Whereas Netsil comes in and provides the observe and the orient piece. So it's all part of the same workload workflow. If you are an IT ops person, you need tools to observe and help orient, so you can decide faster. And tools like Comm and kubernetes, in the future, with one click, just a few clicks, you can make massive changes to your cloud infrastructure. But without observability you are just flying blind. That's where Netsil comes in. So that's why, as you've said, as Rajiv said, like it's going to enhance a lot of areas within Nutanix and, possibly like, even continue selling as a multi cloud monitoring solution. >> Just as we do brownfield input for micro segmentation, you can imagine that it would be a great great product for Comm as well. Being able to do brownfield import of applications and making them into Comm blueprints. >> Yeah, Rajiv, you've had some pent up demand from customers for the micro segmentation piece but give us a little bit.. You said there's other applications, what should we be expecting to see from the Netsil product line? >> So as CTU I can talk future, so let me tell you some stuff on the kubernete timelines. One great area for us to explore is around security operations. Since since Netsil is already in the net world looking at all traffic, it can easily establish a baseline, of which Vms, which containers normally talk to each other. What kind of requests to make. And it's registered at layer seven, so it can even go and look into what kind of API endpoints are normally called. And once it's base-lined this, detecting variation, selecting violations is going to be relatively simple. So we can alert on security violations, unusual behavior, services making calls to services that shouldn't be making calls to. All that kind of stuff. So that's one area for us to explore. We talked about Comm, so Comm can benefit greatly by being able to import brownfield applications into the Comm umbrella, making blueprints out of them. There's integrations with Prism Pro, which will enable the kind of metrics that Netsil is collecting and integrating it to what Prism Pro already does, putting into one single framework, adding it to capacity planning, adding in all the Prism Pro features that we have. So there's a lot of stuff we can do. >> So that's an awful lot of data. Where's this stored and what's the engine behind it? >> That's a great question. Actually, Netsil not only innovated in this unique way of collecting, we also invented a lot in-time series databases. So the back end of Netsil is powered by a database called Apache Druid, which is an OLAP time series database. So it can ingest that scale and you can run complex queries in sub-second latency XQ. So it can like summarize billions of data points at sub-second latencies. And the third thing that Netsil innovated is, in the visualizations. We are talking about, like, visualizing this complex data that is coming from these modern transforming environments. That's another area where Netsil innovated with this Maps interface to summarize and build easy-to-understand visualizations on your complex infrastructure. >> Now I'm scared that my head would explode but I would love to get you guys on with Satyam and talk through what additional data and when it comes to IOT machine learning, what additional insights. Quick question, are you guys working with Satyam at all at this point? >> We've started, like, understanding the lay of the land, so we're, like, still getting introduced to a lot of teams. As you guys know, these Nutanix is now growing very rapidly, there's so many areas to, like, learn about. And we are primarily working with a micro segmentation team right now but going forward, you will see Netsil's goodness being brought into other areas at Nutanix. >> Yeah, Rajiv one question I have from a software standpoint in general, where does AI fit into, you know, what you're doing with Zai and Comm? >> Yes, so for all of them, you know, we're using machine learning fairly extensively today to even do basic things like capacity planning, the what-if modeling that we've been doing. But to go beyond machine learning, if we actually invest in building an AI platform, I feel we can do a lot more in terms of root cause analysis and mediation, troubleshooting of applications, finding performance bottlenecks automatically. Essentially, really making that invisible infrastructure dream come true. We're close, we're not quite there yet. >> Yeah, and it's really about, like, getting quality data in without friction. So you have, like, AI is now being commoditized in the industry like all the algorithms are now like mainstream. So the biggest challenge has always been how do you go and capture the data at low friction? That's what Netsil brings onboard. >> Yeah, I'm super excited for the micro segmentation. Let's talk about what if customers... What has been the customer reaction to Netsil and just the new capability? >> We see a lot of excitement. This is micro segmentation barely been out, what, a couple of months at this point? And we already have fairly large customers deploying it out there, and a lot of demand for proof of concepts and so on at this point. It was very clear to us from the beginning that when people were looking at other SDN solutions, the number one use case they were using in the enterprise was for micro segmentation. So we took that, we made it as simple as we could. In true Nutanix fashion we said, "okay, let's make micro segmentation as one-click as we can." And it's been gratifying, I think, to see the initial reaction. In fact, some of the initial feedback we've gotten has been along the lines of, this is almost too simple. >> So one of the challenges that we've had in Enterprise is hybrid cloud. When you look at a EC2 instance and you have an internal database and the two communicate, that EC2 instance is ephemeral, we don't know how to handle that. Does Netsil address that challenge at all? >> It does, in fact, it's been designed for even a faster moving world of containers. I'll give you an example of kubernetes, it is, I mean, a similar example. So next Hill installs as a daemon set on kubernetes experiencing structure insertion. You are, like, independently inserting without developers. And as soon as it is installed, it's not just looking at packets, it's also like tapping into docker socket for metadata. So as soon as containers go up and down, new ones brought up, it actually pulls the metadata, the container IDs, the service IDs, kubernetes, pod names and whatnot. And then measures that to the metrics that we are collecting. So that in the UI, as you saw in the demo today, you're not so much slicing and dicing by IP addresses. You're slicing and dicing by that service tax, so your BMS can come and go, containers can come and go. But we are looking at the behavior of this group of cattle, and you know the cattle versus pets analogy, the whole idea in the new world is, to like, create these services as the new pets and your cattle are ephemeral, and the whole idea that Netsil can discover micro-services, discover the boundary of micro services by looking at layer 7 behavior and by smartly grouping things based on the behavior. So we know exactly what a MySQL database and different installations of MySQL look like based on the behavior and the query behavior, and group them together. >> So enforcement. And is that at the bot level or is that at the container level? >> So on the enforcement side, Netsil is mostly on the visibility. So on the micro segmentation side there is... >> Today micro-segmentation, of which for Vms as we build out our next version of container services, we are looking into building a micro segmentation for kubernetes as well, and that will be at the bot level. >> Alright Kieth, I'm looking forward to this is CTO advisor podcast, digging a little bit more into micro-segmentation. It may be Rajiv and.. >> We'll have them on for sure. >> ...and Harjot can stop by so time. But thank you gentlemen so much for coming. Congratulations on the update. Looking forward to hearing more. Keith and I have a little bit more here left of day one of Nutanix dot next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, Kieth Townsend. Thank you for watching the Cube. (Electronic Music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Minimin joined by Keith Townsend, and we're here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program Binny Gill, who's the CTO of cloud services at Nutanix, and welcome a first time guest, a long time watcher, first-time caller, Vijay Rayapati, who's the general manager of Nutanix Beam a brand new service at NEXT, came from the Minjar acquisition. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Vijay what, so for those that don't know, bring us back a little bit, you know, Minjar tells a little bit about the company, how many people and then we'll get into the integration and the launch. >> Yeah, so we started Minjar in 2012, late 2012, primarily focused on building our public cloud optimization service, so our flagship product is Bot Metric, which is one of the which is one of the high straighter interview solution in the (mumbles) marketplace. We are primarily based in Bangalo, and focused on helping customers as they're moving to this public, our journey, how can you help them deliver governance across their consumption, from a cost perspective. And compliance from a security perspective. That's what we were focused on, and we joined Nutanix last quarter. I'm really excited to be here, I look forward to continue building on it. >> Alright, Binny maybe you can help us connect the dots, so, look at Zai, look at the services that Nutanix is building, usually it starts with your infrastructure. >> Yep. >> And that's not where Minjar came from so, help us connect the dots as to how, what led to the acquisition, how it expands the portfolio, and what's your first SAS product? >> Yeah, I mean if you look at what we are talking about as our true north, what we're doing is we're building a hybrid cloud. We started with building a private cloud, and customers asking us, hey solve the public cloud problem for us, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. And most of the enterprises today are dispersed. So when we talk about enterprise cloud what we mean is dispersed cloud including IOT devices, you'll see some of that in the demo this evening. So the first question that comes to mind is okay, how am I going to manage all my dispersed cloud entities? And not all of them are owned by Nutanix. So when we looked at Minjar and the capabilities, it was right on target, they're helping customers, consume the cloud and solve the two problems that they have that they lose sleep on, one is do I have control on cost? And the other is do I have control on security compliance? So that's a good capability to have and with Vijay's teams help, we're going to expand it to all the clouds including Nutanix and beyond and provide it to all the customers. >> So today, where is the service, how do I consume it? Help me understand that. >> So this is the first SAS service that Nutanix has launched and it can be consumed from beam.nutanix.com. And we intend to continue on the service in future as a SAS offering, for customers. Both Nutanix customer and non-Nutanix customers. What we have today is we support Amazon cloud, and Azure, and we're working on bringing integration for Nutanix and then we'll bring support for other cloud providers as well. >> So, I'm sorry, just how many customers did you have running on the Bot Metric service in the past? >> We had a couple of hundred customers using Bot Metric, we track close to about a billion dollar plus in public cloud consumption through Bot Metric before it became Nutanix. >> So Vijay, help us understand the larger industry and this larger space. It's been relatively acrotic space for some time, there's been a lot of solutions that helped with cloud security, performance monitoring, et cetera. What was the unique gap or value opportunity you saw at Bot Metric? >> Yeah I mean there are two unique things that we found when we work with these public cloud customers. The challenges are, (mumbles) which are providing this ability, right? But there weren't many tools providing ability to remediate those things that you detect. Essentially form day one, when built Bot Metric platform, we built it like an action-oriented platform. So we not only get visibility, you could essentially automate those issues, either for an optimization or for control. To an automation agent, so there is a lot of invisible automation in Nutanix Beam, versus just being this beautiful UI, which can give you a lot of insights and reports. And that's a big differentiator, that's one of the reasons why a lot of customers when they write reviews of the product, they say man I really love it because it not only tells me what I need to do, I don't need to go and do those hundred things as an engineer, and I can rather click to fix of deploy an automation that can go an do these things, right? >> And one of the other things that was very interesting in what Beam does is, it also can predict what the cost is going to be at the end of the month, instead of being surprised by the end of the month bill, you know how it is today, and how the system is predicting it, and that gives you more control on making sure that if there's an over-expenditure that's going to happen, you can take actions today. >> So what type of automation and adjustments can be made on my behalf? >> Yeah, I think pretty much anything that a cloud ops, or devops engineer do, what we don't do is we don't do any provisioning or orchestration, right? Even as a Bot Metric, we never did that. What we were focused on is, how can we solve operational issues on a day-to-day basis? Whether they're related to cost, or they're related to compliance, or they're related to automation. So it can detect things, you can do custom scaling from Beam, you can do resizing of things, you can clean up unused resources, you can go and run custom audits using Python on Beam. So there are lot of things that day two or a day three on a continuous basis as a cloud ops or a devops engineer that you need to do. That's what we deliver as a invisible automation, or we call it event automation. And so when events happen, how can we automate those things, or right ones use, multiple times. >> Binny, can you walk us through, what kind of Nutanix stamp has been put on the product leading to the Beam, maybe give us a little bit of your philosophy as to how the software acquisitions, what they have to go through before they become real Nutanix products. >> First of all, any acquisition, we want to make sure that the team is a great team. People are the most important. From a technology perspective, they need to be solving the pinpoints of the customers. Now when we integrate any service into our cloud platform, we focus on three things, one is identity. So when a customer logs in to our Zai cloud services, or logs in on PRAM, they should be able to use a single sign-on across all the services. Second thing is billing, we're going to make sure that how we bill the customer, it's not like separate bills that come and they have to put them together, it has to be single billing. Also in terms of how you spend, we're working on programs where you can buy some Nutanix currency coins, and then you can use it either in the private cloud or in the public cloud, but the decision could be a late binding decision. And finally, it's about making sure that the one-click simplicity that we keep talking about and delivering is there. And we've been lucky that with the Beam product, a lot of it is already there, that's why it's already giad. But we make sure that it goes through the same rigor of making sure that the user experience is awesome. >> So let's talk about that time to integration I'll call it. The ability for you guys to take Beam or Bot Metric at that time, a completely separate product from COM, Zai, and then you take that, turn it into Beam, a SAS product, which isn't your first SAS product, How do you keep that consistent view across the entire Nutanix portfolio experience, so that administrators are not leaving one tool to go into another one, which a SAS offering is very different than what you guys have offered in Apetex. >> So we're working on that, both on premises view and in the cloud view. So as you might have noticed when we came up with Zai, we said it's like cloud services. And DR is the first service. 'Cause when you log into Zai, you're logging into all of the cloud services. And then the menu of services will show up, and Beam is one, DR is one, and more will come in, so we wanted to be taught through that. On premises, if you'll notice in our history, we had Prism Central, and then we announced Com Support, and it's baked into Prism, it's not a separate tool. We took one and a half years to make sure that it does not look like a schizophrenic set of products. When we announced Flow, if you look at other vendors like VMware, they have separate NSX manager, and SS controllers, in our case, it's the same Prism Central, once you upgrade, you get that feature. So that's in our discipline, and anything we do, we take the time and make sure it's going to be a single experience for the customer. We're doing the same thing so, Vijay's team this quite rapid and agile and doing stuff, they've integrated with our single identity system, integrating with a single billing system. So that has happened rapidly with this case. >> I think we focus a lot, at least at Nutanix, when I joined, there is a lot of emphasis on experience. How do we make sure we deliver consistent experience for the user from an identity perspective, from a service use perspective, as well as from a support perspective, right? I know it's a common support, it's a common identity, and it's a common billing, and you already touched upon it as we are innovating on a lot of the services, you know, there is a lot of thinking going on, saying you know, how do we bring a common experience, unified experience that is seamless, rather than having different endpoints, people need to go on and try to remember these things. I think we will continue to work on, you know, innovate on that front. But experience is one thing that Nutanix is very good at, you know, if you go onto social media and look at, you know a lot of people are saying, oh man, we really like what we saw from a user experience perspective of the product. And we already took a lot of those design concepts, you know, Nutanix has, in terms of the UI and UX. The Beam that you see today is completely consistent with that 3.0 design philosophy, internally for our products. So the customer has same kind of, experience. Of course it's a SAS service, as Binny said, we are trying to bring lot of this SAS services and Zai cloud services so the user can consume it, just like they consume a GCP or an azure, or AWS, right? And of the day, you have EC to RDS. There is a common frame that brings all this together. >> One additional thing that we're doing, which has not been done before is, providing these services in a hybrid mode. Right, so some of these services like COM, and infrastructure as a service capability, we've announced ARA, how do we provide it in hybrid cloud world where you can run the service on PRAM, you can migrate, adapt it, depends on the service. So the service should also be available in the cloud. And those are some of the hard problems that we are working on, but we believe that we have the tools and the experience to make that happen. >> So, Vijay, just one that was announced, you got some cool new T-shirts you're going to show us. What should we be looking for from the roadmap there? And yeah, show that T-shirt off. (laughter) >> There are two primary things that we are very focused on. One is, how can we bring in lot more intelligence, not just from insights and actions. How can we help customers make those choices of moving the workload, because if you see there're a lot of components that Nutanix is building. Even today we announced Cloud Extract, which is kind of a one-click mobility, not just from cloud to Nutanix, it is going to support from Nutanix to other clouds as well. Because there is a strong cultural belief within the company, that we need to have, give customers the freedom of choice. And deliver a good service, that I prize, so that they feel feel confident about what they're doing, and what we deliver to them. So in that context, one is obviously, bringing multiple clouds. Currently we support Amazon and Azure, but we will bring GCP support, and we will launch, Nutanix, we will launch, other providers as well, we won't start just with them. And the next thing is, how do we make this experience a lot more seamless? And we'll also integrate with COM and a couple of other products that we have as we accline. So that customers can get visibility of cost by workloads by apps, they don't need to come to Beam to consume them. >> So Binny one last question. This is critically important as you bring out your first SAS offering. Billing and procurement, what is the average experience for the Nutanix customer who hadn't- The infrastructure team didn't whip out a credit card and buy a NX system, what is the experience for setting up billing with your SAS services? >> Right, so a lot of it is not giad yet, but if you look at some of the demos that we have done for Zai cloud services, including DIA, It's, the customer can provide a credit card, and consume it as they're used to with the public cloud. But we also have programs where they can buy some credits, Nutanix coins up front, and use them both on PRAM, and in the cloud. So these things are in the works, and we are listening to our customers. One size does not fit all and we know that in the enterprise. But we'll have multiple options for them. >> Excellent, sounds just like, I've listened to my children saying, I get the coins to do fortnite, and things like that that the millennials will be good. They buy some credits, buy it here, buy it there, use it up. Binny and Vijay, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the launch of the product we look forward to keeping an eye on it as that grows and the portfolio grows. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you for having me. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Minimin, back with lots more programming here at Nutanix.next 2018, thanks for watchin' theCube. (futuristic music)

(upbeat pop music) >> [Narrator] France! It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat pop music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, gonna help me with some analysis of what's been happening here at the show, Keith Humphreys, who is the managing consultant at euroLAN Research. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure, Stu. >> Alright, so, Keith, you and I were the only analysts at the Vienna show last year, they've grown he analyst program a little bit as, you know, most of us in the community been watching Nutanix for many years. Tell us a little bit about kind of your background, and what specifically you focus on. >> Okay, so, euroLAN is an industry analyst company focused on helping vendors optimize routes to market in Europe. So, we're a channel analyst company founded in '93, in Paris, France, I was employee number five, and we're still about five consultants, and as I say, we're very vendor focused on channels. >> Yeah, well, it goes without saying, in our industry things are changing a lot, but boy, has the channel been changing massively, you know, everything from the impact of service providers to the public cloud. So, let's start kind of at the macro level a little bit. What are some of the big issues? The channels always, you know, we say they're coin operated. Where do they make money, where are they concerned about, what's exciting them these days? >> I think at a macro level what's really exciting, if you look at the book B four B, it describes the risk having gone from corporate back to the vendor. So, before the enterprise used to buy kit, buy stuff, buy products and have to integrate them themselves, take 18 months before they actually got a working product, but in the mean time the vendors had produced the invoice, maybe not even shipped the kit before they could recognize the revenue, now with as-a-service that's totally changed. The risk is gone from the customer, right they way back to the vendor, it's a fascinating point, and the channel's stuck in between here, trying to be the good guys, still trying to integrate that stuff, still trying to produce those solutions, but only getting paid at an annuity revenue model. It's very different. >> Yeah, you know, I was involved in some of the early convergent infrastructure solutions, and you go to some companies and they're like, "We make tons of money racking and stacking and cabling." We're like, "Come on, that's not huge value add, let's help you add more value, get more involved, be more consultative solution-selling and the like." We've only seen that accelerate with the like of hyper converge infrastructure and solutions-as-a-service as you said where sometimes it's just frictionless, just acquire what I need when I need it. How's the channel doing? >> I think the channel's doing okay, but they're in denial, because of this issue. I think if you look at the way Nutanix started as a box provider and now moving to software, some of the channel is really railing against that, and saying, "We still want to do it this way." They're not learning the lesson that they must move to an annuity model basis, because it's a huge business transformation. We jointly run a workshop with IDC to help system integrators make that transition across, and we've only booked through a half a dozen companies for it. They should be knocking our door down to go through this, but they're finding it really hard. >> Alright, so, how's Nutanix doing in the channel? >> So, I think, interestingly, I think it was Chad Sakac of VMware said that they're having to bring out a proof of concept box for vSphere. So they can put that box into customers, so they can try it out. Interesting for a software vendor you're having to package something, so they've gone in that direction. Where as Nutanix are moving in the other direction, going to software only from the box. That's fascinating, but they're trying to drag that channel with them. Are CDW really happy that they're moving to a software-only model? Maybe not. >> Well, look, we've been discussing this week the software-only model, of course, there's still gotta be an appliance somewhere. So, from a channel standpoint, if tomorrow Nutanix says, "Hey, we're only gonna do software and you're gonna do..." does that have a significant impact on the channel, if they now get it if it's a distributor, or some other piece, how much will that impact the channel? >> I think it's going back to the old model of digital days where the channel partner's going back to integrating stuff. Which I think is great news for them, because they can add value, but have they still got the skills? A lot of them have lost those skills, they've been de-franchised or they've de-franchised themselves. >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out, as to whether it comes in a similar form factor. I don't expect that they're gonna be getting Lego pieces and putting together, it's still mostly gonna be pieces. How 'bout Nutanix's been going a lot of new directions, trying to expand, software-only isn't just about saying, kinda the base stack and AHV, but Zai and calm. Some of these other pieces. Is the channel ready for these kind of things? Does Nutanix have to then do way more of it and the channel's just for filling it? How does that dynamic work? >> I think Nutanix has to go out and create the market. They've got to make end customers aware of this and then the enterprise customers will be asking their channel partners for it so they'll have to get up to speed. You know it's a push and pull model to channel. You can't just push through the channel. I heard someone from Nutanix describe the channel as an extension of their sales force. It's just not. You know computer center's go out and sell computer centers. They don't sell Nutanix. They sell their customer benefit and Nutanix is a small part of that solution. Every project is software based. It's around SAP. It's around Oracle and there's some infrastructure to run it on. It's a small part. >> It's interesting, I got to interview a service provider that has then become a reseller of Nutanix solutions. We sometimes say that service providers are the new channel. How is that dynamic playing out? >> Well, if I was to want infrastructure in our office I wouldn't phone British Telecom for it. (laughs) >> Fair enough. What about, we're talking about the multi cloud world. I've found that there's some systems integrators out there that are offering Azure services, some are engaging AWS has been really good at building out their channel. How's that in Europe these days? How much is the channel engaged in the public cloud? >> We're seeing Amazon with AWS starting to reach out to the channel at long last, with channel programs, channel recruitment. They're not gonna get rich reselling that but they'll get rich by putting the professional services on there. You know, what should I run on here? Is it good for computers? Is it good for scaling? Is it good for additional workloads? They've gotta add professional services but even as we run our workshops we see exactly the same thing. As they move to as-a-service, it might be profitable to a degree but it takes you four or five years to get there. So you've gotta be adding professional services on top of that revenue to maintain it. >> Well, I have to think there's good opportunity there because while there was this promise the future's gonna be simple. Right? Public cloud, it's nice and easy swipe a credit card and good. There's so many features out there. SaaS, anybody's that's used SaaS providers when they really wanna use it there's requirements there. So is the channel stepping up to fill some of that gap or will the Accentures, those kind of consulting come in and take that revenue? >> I think it depends on the company's size. We profiled in our newsletter a small UK company who get digital transformation. This quarter we profiled Accenture. They're both doing the same things, just addressing different parts of the market. I think the other interesting thing is, you mentioned the difficulty, obviously AWS uses its own terminology and it looks very complicated but what I do like is the Nutanix one click based around machine learning. That's really exciting. Sudheesh Nair was just talking about DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero and how it's learned the Chinese Go Program. It self learned that. No one taught that. It actually self learned that. There was an article on the FT which was trying to say this is frightening. It's not frightening if we're gonna move into an IoT age, if we're gonna move into an autonomous car age. We're gonna need software that's written to Sigma Nine not Sigma Six and I think only machines can do that. We're not very good at writing software. >> Keith, what more should Nutanix be doing? What advice do you give them on what they can do to engage even more with the channel? >> They've gotta ramp up the marketing. They've gotta provide the air cover for the channel. They've gotta go out and create the demand, create the awareness. The channel will follow through on that. >> One last question I have for you, what advice do you give to the channel today? For them to stay profitable, stay relevant, in this ever changing future? >> It's professional services and annuity revenue. Days of selling boxes are gone. They'll always be boxes you say but you know, it's pure commodity now. Maybe they should invest in super micro? >> Alright. Well Keith Humphries, pleasure to talk with you again and thank you much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. You're watching theCube. (upbeat pop music)

Section 1 of 13 [00:00:00 - 00:10:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen our program will begin momentarily. Thank you. (singing) This presentation and the accompanying oral commentary may include forward looking statements that are subject to risks uncertainties and other factors beyond our control. Our actual results, performance or achievements may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements because of various risk factors. Including those detailed in our annual report on form 10-K for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2017 filed with the SEC. Any future product or roadmap information presented is intended to outline general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any functionality and should not be used when making any purchasing decision. (singing) Ladies and gentlemen please welcome Vice President Corporate Marketing Nutanix, Julie O'Brien. Julie O'Brien: All right. How about those Nutanix .NEXT dancers, were they amazing or what? Did you see how I blended right in, you didn't even notice I was there. [French 00:07:23] to .NEXT 2017 Europe. We're so glad that you could make it today. We have such a great agenda for you. First off do not miss tomorrow morning. We're going to share the outtakes video of the handclap video you just saw. Where are the customers, the partners, the Nutanix employee who starred in our handclap video? Please stand up take a bow. You are not going to want to miss tomorrow morning, let me tell you. That is going to be truly entertaining just like the next two days we have in store for you. A content rich highly interactive, number of sessions throughout our agenda. Wow! Look around, it is amazing to see how many cloud builders we have with us today. Side by side you're either more than 2,200 people who have traveled from all corners of the globe to be here. That's double the attendance from last year at our first .NEXT Conference in Europe. Now perhaps some of you are here to learn the basics of hyperconverged infrastructure. Others of you might be here to build your enterprise cloud strategy. And maybe some of you are here to just network with the best and brightest in the industry, in this beautiful French Riviera setting. Well wherever you are in your journey, you'll find customers just like you throughout all our sessions here with the next two days. From Sligro to Schroders to Societe Generale. You'll hear from cloud builders sharing their best practices and their lessons learned and how they're going all in with Nutanix, for all of their workloads and applications. Whether it's SAP or Splunk, Microsoft Exchange, unified communications, Cloud Foundry or Oracle. You'll also hear how customers just like you are saving millions of Euros by moving from legacy hypervisors to Nutanix AHV. And you'll have a chance to post some of your most challenging technical questions to the Nutanix experts that we have on hand. Our Nutanix technology champions, our MPXs, our MPSs. Where are all the people out there with an N in front of their certification and an X an R an S an E or a C at the end. Can you wave hello? You might be surprised to know that in Europe and the Middle East alone, we have more than 2,600 >> Julie: In Europe and the Middle East alone, we have more than 2,600 certified Nutanix experts. Those are customers, partners, and also employees. I'd also like to say thank you to our growing ecosystem of partners and sponsors who are here with us over the next two days. The companies that you meet here are the ones who are committed to driving innovation in the enterprise cloud. Over the next few days you can look forward to hearing from them and seeing some fantastic technology integration that you can take home to your data center come Monday morning. Together, with our partners, and you our customers, Nutanix has had such an exciting year since we were gathered this time last year. We were named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for integrated systems two years in a row. Just recently Gartner named us the revenue market share leader in their recent market analysis report on hyper-converged systems. We know enjoy more than 35% revenue share. Thanks to you, our customers, we received a net promoter score of more than 90 points. Not one, not two, not three, but four years in a row. A feat, I'm sure you'll agree, is not so easy to accomplish, so thank you for your trust and your partnership in us. We went public on NASDAQ last September. We've grown to more than 2,800 employees, more than 7,000 customers and 125 countries and in Europe and the Middle East alone, in our Q4 results, we added more than 250 customers just in [Amea 00:11:38] alone. That's about a third of all of our new customer additions. Today, we're at a pivotal point in our journey. We're just barely scratching the surface of something big and Goldman Sachs thinks so too. What you'll hear from us over the next two days is this: Nutanix is on it's way to building and becoming an iconic enterprise software company. By helping you transform your data center and your business with Enterprise Cloud Software that gives you the power of freedom of choice and flexibility in the hardware, the hypervisor and the cloud. The power of one click, one OS, any cloud. And now, to tell you more about the digital transformation that's possible in your business and your industry and share a little bit around the disruption that Nutanix has undergone and how we've continued to reinvent ourselves and maybe, if we're lucky, share a few hand clap dance moves, please welcome to stage Nutanix Founder, CEO and Chairman, Dheeraj Pandey. Ready? Alright, take it away [inaudible 00:13:06]. >> Dheeraj P: Thank you. Thank you, Julie and thank you every one. It looks like people are still trickling. Welcome to Acropolis. I just hope that we can move your applications to Acropolis faster than we've been able to move people into this room, actually. (laughs) But thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you to our customers, to our partners, to our employees, to our sponsors, to our board members, to our performers, to everybody for their precious time. 'Cause that's the most precious thing you actually have, is time. I want to spend a little bit of time today, not a whole lot of time, but a little bit of time talking about the why of Nutanix. Like why do we exist? Why have we survived? Why will we continue to survive and thrive? And it's simpler than an NQ or category name, the word hyper-convergence, I think we are all complicated. Just thinking about what is it that we need to talk about today that really makes it relevant, that makes you take back something from this conference. That Nutanix is an obvious innovation, it's very obvious what we do is not very complicated. Because the more things change, the more they remain the same, so can we draw some parallels from life, from what's going on around us in our own personal lives that makes this whole thing very natural as opposed to "Oh, it's hyper-converged, it's a category, it's analysts and pundits and media." I actually think it's something new. It's not that different, so I want to start with some of that today. And if you look at our personal lives, everything that we had, has been digitized. If anything, a lot of these gadgets became apps, they got digitized into a phone itself, you know. What's Nutanix? What have we done in the last seven, eight years, is we digitized a lot of hardware. We made everything that used to be single purpose hardware look like pure software. We digitized storage, we digitized the systems manager role, an operations manager role. We are digitizing scriptures, people don't need to write scripts anymore when they automate because we can visually design automation with [com 00:15:36]. And we're also trying to make a case that the cloud itself is not just a physical destination. That it can be digitized and must be digitized as well. So we learn that from our personal lives too, but it goes on. Look at music. Used to be tons of things, if you used to go to [inaudible 00:15:55] Records, I'm sure there were European versions of [inaudible 00:15:57] Records as well, the physical things around us that then got digitized as well. And it goes on and on. We look at entertainment, it's very similar. The idea that if you go to a movie hall, the idea that you buy these tickets, the idea that we'd have these DVD players and DVDs, they all got digitized. Or as [inaudible 00:16:20] want to call it, virtualized, actually. That is basically happening in pretty much new things that we never thought would look this different. One of the most exciting things happening around us is the car industry. It's getting digitized faster than we know. And in many ways that we'd not even imagined 10 years ago. The driver will get digitized. Autonomous cars. The engine is definitely gone, it's a different kind of an engine. In fact, we'll re-skill a lot of automotive engineers who actually used to work in mechanical things to look at real chemical things like battery technologies and so on. A lot of those things that used to be physical are now in software in the car itself. Media itself got digitized. Think about a physical newspaper, or physical ads in newspapers. Now we talk about virtual ads, the digital ads, they're all over on websites and so on is our digital experience now. Education is no different, you know, we look back at the kind of things we used to do physically with physical things. Their now all digital. The experience has become that digital. And I can go on and on. You look at retail, you look at healthcare, look at a lot of these industries, they all are at the cusp of a digital disruption. And in fact, if you look at the data, everybody wants it. We all want a digital transformation for industries, for companies around us. In fact, the whole idea of a cloud is a highly digitized data center, basically. It's not just about digitizing servers and storage and networks and security, it's about virtualizing, digitizing the entire data center itself. That's what cloud is all about. So we all know that it's a very natural phenomenon, because it's happening around us and that's the obviousness of Nutanix, actually. Why is it actually a good thing? Because obviously it makes anything that we digitize and we work in the digital world, bring 10X more productivity and decision making efficiencies as well. And there are challenges, obviously there are challenges, but before I talk about the challenges of digitization, think about why are things moving this fast? Why are things becoming digitally disrupted quicker than we ever imagined? There are some reasons for it. One of the big reasons is obviously we all know about Moore's Law. The fact that a lot of hardware's been commoditized, and we have really miniaturized hardware. Nutanix today runs on a palm-sized server. Obviously it runs on the other end of the spectrum with high-end IBM power systems, but it also runs on palm-sized servers. Moore's Law has made a tremendous difference in the way we actually think about consuming software itself. Of course, the internet is also a big part of this. The fact that there's a bandwidth glut, there's Trans-Pacific cables and Trans-Atlantic cables and so on, has really connected us a lot faster than we ever imagined, actually, and a lot of this was also the telecom revolution of the '90s where we really produced a ton of glut for the internet itself. There's obviously a more subtle reason as well, because software development is democratizing. There's consumer-grade programming languages that we never imagined 10, 15, 20 years ago, that's making it so much faster to write- >> Speaker 1: 15-20 years ago that's making it so much faster to write code, with this crowdsourcing that never existed before with Githubs and things like that, open source. There's a lot more stuff that's happening that's outside the boundary of a corporation itself, which is making things so much faster in terms of going getting disrupted and writing things at 10x the speed it used to be 20 years ago. There is obviously this technology at the tip of our fingers, and we all want it in our mobile experience while we're driving, while we're in a coffee shop, and so on; and there's a tremendous focus on design on consumer-grade simplicity, that's making digital disruption that much more compressed in some of sense of this whole cycle of creative disruption that we talk about, is compressed because of mobility, because of design, because of API, the fact that machines are talking to machines, developers are talking to developers. We are going and miniaturizing the experience of organizations because we talk about micro-services and small two-pizza teams, and they all want to talk about each other using APIs and so on. Massive influence on this digital disruption itself. Of course, one of the reasons why this is also happening is because we want it faster, we want to consume it faster than ever before. And our attention spans are reducing. I like the fact that not many people are watching their cell phones right now, but you can imagine the multi-tasking mode that we are all in today in our lives, makes us want to consume things at a faster pace, which is one of the big drivers of digital disruption. But most importantly, and this is a very dear slide to me, a lot of this is happening because of infrastructure. And I can't overemphasize the importance of infrastructure. If you look at why did Google succeed, it was the ninth search engine, after eight of them before, and if you take a step back at why Facebook succeeded over MySpace and so on, a big reason was infrastructure. They believed in scale, they believed in low latency, they believed in being able to crunch information, at 10x, 100x, bigger scale than anyone else before. Even in our geopolitical lives, look at why is China succeeding? Because they've made infrastructure seamless. They've basically said look, governance is about making infrastructure seamless and invisible, and then let the businesses flourish. So for all you CIOs out there who actually believe in governance, you have to think about what's my first role? What's my primary responsibility? It's to provide such a seamless infrastructure, that lines of business can flourish with their applications, with their developers that can write code 10x faster than ever before. And a lot of these tenets of infrastructure, the fact of the matter is you need to have this always-on philosophy. The fact that it's breach-safe culture. Or the fact that operating systems are hardware agnostic. A lot of these tenets basically embody what Nutanix really stands for. And that's the core of what we really have achieved in the last eight years and want to achieve in the coming five to ten years as well. There's a nuance, and obviously we talk about digital, we talk about cloud, we talk about everything actually going to the cloud and so on. What are the things that could slow us down? What are the things that challenge us today? Which is the reason for Nutanix? Again, I go back to this very important point that the reason why we think enterprise cloud is a nuanced term, because the word "cloud" itself doesn't solve for a lot of the problems. The public cloud itself doesn't solve for a lot of the problems. One of the big ones, and obviously we face it here in Europe as well, is laws of the land. We have bureaucracy, which we need to deal with and respect; we have data sovereignty and computing sovereignty needs that we need to actually fulfill as well, while we think about going at breakneck speed in terms of disrupting our competitors and so on. So there's laws of the land, there's laws of physics. This is probably one of the big ones for what the architecture of cloud will look like itself, over the coming five to ten years. Our take is that cloud will need to be more dispersed than they have ever imagined, because computing has to be local to business operations. Computing has to be in hospitals and factories and shop floors and power plants and on and on and on... That's where you really can have operations and computing really co-exist together, cause speed is important there as well. Data locality is one of our favorite things; the fact that computing and data have to be local, at least the most relevant data has to be local as well. And the fact that electrons travel way faster when it's actually local, versus when you have to have them go over a Wide Area Network itself; it's one of the big reasons why we think that the cloud will actually be more nuanced than just some large data centers. You need to disperse them, you need to actually think about software (cloud is about software). Whether data plane itself could be dispersed and even miniaturized in small factories and shop floors and hospitals. But the control plane of the cloud is centralized. And that's the way you can have the best of both worlds; the control plane is centralized. You think as if you're managing one massive data center, but it's not because you're really managing hundreds or thousands of these sites. Especially if you think about edge-based computing and IoT where you really have your tentacles in tens of thousands of smaller devices and so on. We've talked about laws of the land, which is going to really make this digital transformation nuanced; laws of physics; and the third one, which is really laws of entropy. These are hackers that do this for adrenaline. These are parochial rogue states. These are parochial geo-politicians, you know, good thing I actually left the torture sign there, because apparently for our creative designer, geo-politics is equal to torture as well. So imagine one bad tweet can actually result in big changes to the way we actually live in this world today. And it's important. Geo-politics itself is digitized to a point where you don't need a ton of media people to go and talk about your principles and what you stand for and what you strategy for, for running a country itself is, and so on. And these are all human reasons, political reasons, bureaucratic reasons, compliance and regulations reasons, that, and of course, laws of physics is yet another one. So laws of physics, laws of the land, and laws of entropy really make us take a step back and say, "What does cloud really mean, then?" Cause obviously we want to digitize everything, and it all should appear like it's invisible, but then you have to nuance it for the Global 5000, the Global 10000. There's lots of companies out there that need to really think about GDPR and Brexit and a lot of the things that you all deal with on an everyday basis, actually. And that's what Nutanix is all about. Balancing what we think is all about technology and balancing that with things that are more real and practical. To deal with, grapple with these laws of the land and laws of physics and laws of entropy. And that's where we believe we need to go and balance the private and the public. That's the architecture, that's the why of Nutanix. To be able to really think about frictionless control. You want things to be frictionless, but you also realize that you are a responsible citizen of this continent, of your countries, and you need to actually do governance of things around you, which is computing governance, and data governance, and so on. So this idea of melding the public and the private is really about melding control and frictionless together. I know these are paradoxical things to talk about like how do you really have frictionless control, but that's the life you all lead, and as leaders we have to think about this series of paradoxes itself. And that's what Nutanix strategy, the roadmap, the definition of enterprise cloud is really thinking about frictionless control. And in fact, if anything, it's one of the things is also very interesting; think about what's disrupting Nutanix as a company? We will be getting disrupted along the way as well. It's this idea of true invisibility, the public cloud itself. I'd like to actually bring on board somebody who I have a ton of respect for, this leader of a massive company; which itself is undergoing disruption. Which is helping a lot of its customers undergo disruption as well, and which is thinking about how the life of a business analyst is getting digitized. And what about the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and laws of entropy, and so on. And we're learning a lot from this partner, massively giant company, called IBM. So without further ado, Bob Picciano. >> Bob Picciano: Thanks, >> Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Bob, for being here. I really appreciate your presence here- >> Bob Picciano: My pleasure! >> Speaker 1: And for those of you who actually don't know Bob, Bob is a Senior VP and General Manager at IBM, and is all things cognitive and obviously- >> Speaker 1: IBM is all things cognitive. Obviously, I learn a lot from a lot of leaders that have spent decades really looking at digital disruption. >> Bob: Did you just call me old? >> Speaker 1: No. (laughing) I want to talk about experience and talking about the meaning of history, because I love history, actually, you know, and I don't want to make you look old actually, you're too young right now. When you talk about digital disruption, we look at ourselves and say, "Look we are not extremely invisible, we are invisible, but we have not made something as invisible as the public clouds itself." And hence as I. But what's digital disruption mean for IBM itself? Now, obviously a lot of hardware is being digitized into software and cloud services. >> Bob: Yep. >> Speaker 1: What does it mean for IBM itself? >> Bob: Yeah, if you allow me to take a step back for a moment, I think there is some good foundational understanding that'll come from a particular point of view. And, you talked about it with the number of these dimensions that are affecting the way businesses need to consider their competitiveness. How they offer their capabilities into the market place. And as you reflected upon IBM, you know, we've had decades of involvement in information technology. And there's a big disruption going on in the information technology space. But it's what I call an accretive disruption. It's a disruption that can add value. If you were to take a step back and look at that digital trajectory at IBM you'd see our involvement with information technology in a space where it was all oriented around adding value and capability to how organizations managed inscale processes. Thinking about the way they were going to represent their businesses in a digital form. We came to call them applications. But it was how do you open an account, how do you process a claim, how do you transfer money, how do you hire an employee? All the policies of a company, the way the people used to do it mechanically, became digital representations. And that foundation of the digital business process is something that IBM helped define. We invented the role of the CIO to help really sponsor and enter in this notion that businesses could re represent themselves in a digital way and that allowed them to scale predictably with the qualities of their brand, from local operations, to regional operations, to international operations, and show up the same way. And, that added a lot of value to business for many decades. And we thrived. Many companies, SAP all thrived during that span. But now we're in a new space where the value of information technology is hitting a new inflection point. Which is not about how you scale process, but how you scale insight, and how you scale wisdom, and how you scale knowledge and learning from those operational systems and the data that's in those operational systems. >> Speaker 1: How's it different from 1993? We're talking about disruption. There was a time when IBM reinvented itself, 20-25 years ago. >> Bob: Right. >> Speaker 1: And you said it's bigger than 25 years ago. Tell us more. >> Bob: You know, it gets down. Everything we know about that process space right down to the very foundation, the very architecture of the CPU itself and the computer architecture, the von Neumann architecture, was all optimized on those relatively static scaled business processes. When you move into the notion where you're going to scale insight, scale knowledge, you enter the era that we call the cognitive era, or the era of intelligence. The algorithms are very different. You know the data semantically doesn't integrate well across those traditional process based pools and reformation. So, new capabilities like deep learning, machine learning, the whole field of artificial intelligence, allows us to reach into that data. Much of it unstructured, much of it dark, because it hasn't been indexed and brought into the space where it is directly affecting decision making processes in a business. And you have to be able to apply that capability to those business processes. You have to rethink the computer, the circuitry itself. You have to think about how the infrastructure is designed and organized, the network that is required to do that, the experience of the applications as you talked about have to be very natural, very engaging. So IBM does all of those things. So as a function of our transformation that we're on now, is that we've had to reach back, all the way back from rethinking the CPU, and what we dedicate our time and attention to. To our services organization, which is over 130,000 people on the consulting side helping organizations add digital intelligence to this notion of a digital business. Because, the two things are really a confluence of what will make this vision successful. >> Speaker 1: It looks like massive amounts of change for half a million people who work with the company. >> Bob: That's right. >> Speaker 1: I'm sure there are a lot of large customers out here, who will also read into this and say, "If IBM feels disrupted ... >> Bob: Uh hm >> Speaker 1: How can we actually stay not vulnerable? Actually there is massive amounts of change around their own competitive landscape as well. >> Bob: Look, I think every company should feel vulnerable right. If you're at this age, this cognitive era, the age of digital intelligence, and you're not making a move into being able to exploit the capabilities of cognition into the business process. You are vulnerable. If you're at that intersection, and your competitor is passing through it, and you're not taking action to be able to deploy cognitive infrastructure in conjunction with the business processes. You're going to have a hard time keeping up, because it's about using the machines to do the training to augment the intelligence of our employees of our professionals. Whether that's a lawyer, or a doctor, an educator or whether that's somebody in a business function, who's trying to make a critical business decision about risk or about opportunity. >> Speaker 1: Interesting, very interesting. You used the word cognitive infrastructure. >> Bob: Uh hm >> Speaker 1: There's obviously computer infrastructure, data infrastructure, storage infrastructure, network infrastructure, security infrastructure, and the core of cognition has to be infrastructure as well. >> Bob: Right >> Speaker 1: Which is one of the two things that the two companies are working together on. Tell us more about the collaboration that we are actually doing. >> Bob: We are so excited about our opportunity to add value in this space, so we do think very differently about the cognitive infrastructure that's required for this next generation of computing. You know I mentioned the original CPU was built for very deterministic, very finite operations; large precision floating point capabilities to be able to accurately calculate the exact balance, the exact amount of transfer. When you're working in the field of AI in cognition. You actually want variable precision. Right. The data is very sparse, as opposed to the way that deterministic or scorecastic operations work, which is very dense or very structured. So the algorithms are redefining the processes that the circuitry actually has to run. About five years ago, we dedicated a huge effort to rethink everything about the chip and what we made to facilitate an orchestra of participation to solve that problem. We all know the GPU has a great benefit for deep learning. But the GPU in many cases, in many architectures, specifically intel architectures, it's dramatically confined by a very small amount of IO bandwidth that intel allows to go on and off the chip. At IBM, we looked at all 686 roughly square millimeters of our chip and said how do we reuse that square area to open up that IO bandwidth? So the innovation of a GPU or a FPGA could really be utilized to it's maximum extent. And we could be an orchestrator of all of the diverse compute that's going to be necessary for AI to really compel these new capabilities. >> Speaker 1: It's interesting that you mentioned the fact that you know power chips have been redefined for the cognitive era. >> Bob: Right, for Lennox for the cognitive era. >> Speaker 1: Exactly, and now the question is how do you make it simple to use as well? How do you bring simplicity which is where ... >> Bob: That's why we're so thrilled with our partnership. Because you talked about the why of Nutanix. And it really is about that empowerment. Doing what's natural. You talked about the benefits of calm and being able to really create that liberation of an information technology professional, whether it's in operations or in development. Having the freedom of action to make good decisions about defining the infrastructure and deploying that infrastructure and not having to second guess the physical limitations of what they're going to have to be dealing with. >> Speaker 1: That's why I feel really excited about the fact that you have the power of software, to really meld the two forms together. The intel form and the power form comes together. And we have some interesting use cases that our CIO Randy Phiffer is also really exploring, is how can a power form serve as a storage form for our intel form. >> Bob: Sure. >> Speaker 1: It can serve files and mocks and things like that. >> Bob: Any data intensive application where we have seen massive growth in our Lennox business, now for our business, Lennox is 20% of the revenue of our power systems. You know, we started enabling native Lennox distributions on top of little Indian ones, on top of the power capabilities just a few years ago, and it's rocketed. And the reason for that if for any data intensive application like a data base, a no sequel database or a structured data base, a dupe in the unstructured space, they typically run about three to four times better price performance on top of Lennox on power, than they will on top of an intel alternative. >> Speaker 1: Fascinating. >> Bob: So all of these applications that we're talking about either create or consume a lot of data, have to manage a lot of flexibility in that space, and power is a tremendous architecture for that. And you mentioned also the cohabitation, if you will, between intel and power. What we want is that optionality, for you to utilize those benefits of the 3X better price performance where they apply and utilize the commodity base where it applies. So you get the cost benefits in that space and the depth and capability in the space for power. >> Speaker 1: Your tongue in cheek remark about commodity intel is not lost on people actually. But tell us about... >> Speaker 1: Intel is not lost on people actually. Tell us about ... Obviously we digitized Linux 10, 15 years ago with [inaudible 00:40:07]. Have you tried to talk about digitizing AIX? That is the core of IBM's business for the last 20, 25, 30 years. >> Bob: Again, it's about this ability to compliment and extend the investments that businesses have made during their previous generations of decision making. This industry loves to talk about shifts. We talked about this earlier. That was old, this is new. That was hard, this is easy. It's not about shift, it's about using the inflection point, the new capability to extend what you already have to make it better. And that's one thing that I must compliment you, and the entire Nutanix organization. It's really empowering those applications as a catalog to be deployed, managed, and integrated in a new way, and to have seamless interoperability into the cloud. We see the AIX workload just having that same benefit for those businesses. And there are many, many 10's of thousands around the world that are critically dependent on every element of their daily operations and productivity of that operating platform. But to introduce that into that network effect as well. >> Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we're looking forward to how we bring the same cloud experience on AIX as well because as a company it keeps us honest when we don't scoff at legacy. We look at these applications the last 10, 15, 20 years and say, "Can we bring them into the new world as well?" >> Bob: Right. >> Speaker 1: That's what design is all about. >> Bob: Right. >> Speaker 1: That's what Apple did with musics. We'll take an old world thing and make it really new world. >> Bob: Right. >> Speaker 1: The way we consume things. >> Bob: That governance. The capability to help protect against the bad actors, the nefarious entropy players, as you will. That's what it's all about. That's really what it takes to do this for the enterprise. It's okay, and possibly easier to do it in smaller islands of containment, but when you think about bringing these class of capabilities into an enterprise, and really helping an organization drive both the flexibility and empowerment benefits of that, but really be able to depend upon it for international operations. You need that level of support. You need that level of capability. >> Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you so much Bob. Really appreciate you coming. [crosstalk 00:42:14] Look forward to your [crosstalk 00:42:14]. >> Bob: Cheers. Thank you. >> Speaker 1: Thanks again for all of you. I know that people are sitting all the way up there as well, which is remarkable. I hope you can actually see some of the things that Sunil and the team will actually bring about, talk about live demos. We do real stuff here, which is truly live. I think one of the requests that I have is help us help you navigate the digital disruption that's upon you and your competitive landscape that's around you that's really creating that disruption. Thank you again for being here, and welcome again to Acropolis. >> Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chief Product and Development Officer, Nutanix Sunil Potti. >> Sunil Potti: Okay, so I'm going to just jump right in because I know a bunch of you guys are here to see the product as well. We are a lot of demos lined up for you guys, and we'll try to mix in the slides, and the demos as well. Here's just an example of the things I always bring up in these conferences to look around, and say in the last few months, are we making progress in simplifying infrastructure? You guys have heard this again and again, this has been our mantra from the beginning, that the hotter things get, the more differentiated a company like Nutanix can be if we can make things simple, or keep things simple. Even though I like this a lot, we found something a little bit more interesting, I thought, by our European marketing team. If you guys need these tea bags, which you will need pretty soon. It's a new tagline for the company, not really. I thought it was apropos. But before I get into the product and the demos, to give you an idea. Every time I go to an event you find ways to memorialize the event. You meet people, you build relationships, you see something new. Last night, nothing to do with the product, I sat beside someone. It was a customer event. I had no idea who I was sitting beside. He was a speaker. How many of you guys know him, by the way? Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Few hands. Good for you. I had no idea who I was sitting beside. I said, "Oh, somebody called Sir. I should be respectful." It's kind of hard for me to be respectful, but I tried. He says, "No, I didn't do anything in the sense. My grandfather was knighted about 100 years ago because he was the governor of Antigua. And when he dies, his son becomes." And apparently Sir Ranulph's dad also died in the war, and so that's how he is a sir. But then I started looking it up because he's obviously getting ready to present. And the background for him is, in my opinion, even though the term goes he's the World's Greatest Living Explorer. I would have actually called it the World's Number One Stag, and I'll tell you why. Really, you should go look it up. So this guy, at the age of 21, gets admitted to Special Forces. If you're from the UK, this is as good as it gets, SAS. Six, seven years into it, he rebels, helps out his local partner because he doesn't like a movie who's building a dam inside this pretty village. And he goes and blows up a dam, and he's thrown out of that Special Forces. Obviously he's in demolitions. Goes all the way. This is the '60's, by the way. Remember he's 74 right now. The '60's he goes to Oman, all by himself, as the only guy, only white guy there. And then around the '70's, he starts truly exploring, truly exploring. And this is where he becomes really, really famous. You have to go see this in real life, when he sees these videos to really appreciate the impact of this guy. All by himself, he's gone across the world. He's actually gone across Antarctica. Now he tells me that Antarctica is the size of China and India put together, and he was prepared for -50 to 60 degrees, and obviously he got -130 degrees. Again, you have to see the videos, see his frostbite. Two of his fingers are cut off, by the way. He hacksawed them himself. True story. And then as he, obviously, aged, his body couldn't keep up with him, but his will kept up with him. So after a recent heart attack, he actually ran seven marathons. But most importantly, he was telling me this story, at 65 he wanted to do something different because his body was letting him down. He said, "Let me do something easy." So he climbed Mount Everest. My point being, what is this related to Nutanix? Is that if Nutanix is a company, without technology, allows to spend more time on life, then we've accomplished a piece of our vision. So keep that in mind. Keep that in mind. Now comes the boring part, which is the product. The why, what, how of Nutanix. Neeris talked about this. We have two acts in this company. Invisible Infrastructure was what we started off. You heard us talk about it. How did we do it? Using one-click technologies by converging infrastructure, computer storage, virtualization, et cetera, et cetera. What we are now about is about changing the game. Saying that just like we'd applicated what powers Google and Amazon inside the data center, could we now make them all invisible? Whether it be inside or outside, could we now make clouds invisible? Clouds could be made invisible by a new level of convergence, not about computer storage, but converging public and private, converging CAPEX and OPEX, converging consumption models. And there, beyond our core products, Acropolis and Prism, are these new products. As you know, we have this core thesis, right? The core thesis says what? Predictable workloads will stay inside the data center, elastic workloads will go outside, as long as the experience on both sides is the same. So if you can genuinely have a cloud-like experience delivered inside a data center, then that's the right a- >> Speaker 1: Genuinely have a cloud like experience developed inside the data center. And that's the right answer of predictable workloads. Absolutely the answer of elastic workloads, doesn't matter whether security or compliance. Eventually a public cloud will have a data center right beside your region, whether through local partner or a top three cloud partner. And you should use it as your public cloud of choice. And so, our goal is to ensure that those two worlds are converged. And that's what Calm does, and we'll talk about that. But at the same time, what we found in late 2015, we had a bunch of customers come to us and said "Look, I love this, I love the fact that you're going to converge public and private and all that good stuff. But I have these environments and these apps that I want to be delivered as a service but I want the same operational tooling. I don't want to have two different environments but I don't want to manage my data centers. Especially my secondary data centers, DR data centers." And that's why we created Xi, right? And you'll hear a lot more about this, obviously it's going to start off in the U.S but very rapidly launch in Europe, APJ globally in the next 9-12 months. And so we'll spend some quality time on those products as well today. So, from the journey that we're at, we're starting with the score cloud that essentially says "Look, your public and private needs to be the same" We call that the first instantiation of your cloud architectures and we're essentially as a company, want to build this enterprise cloud operating system as a fabric across public and private. But that's just the starting point. The starting point evolves to the score architecture that we believe that the cloud is being dispersed. Just like you have a public and a private cloud in the core data centers and so forth, you'll need a similar experience inside your remote office branch office, inside your DR data centers, inside your branches, and it won't stop there. It'll go all the way to the edge. All we're already seeing this right? Not just in the army where your forward operating bases in Afghanistan having a three note cluster sitting inside a tent. But we're seeing this in a variety of enterprise scenarios. And here's an example. So, here's a customer, global oil and gas company, has couple of primary data centers running Nutanix, uses GCP as a core public cloud platform, has a whole bunch of remote offices, but it also has this interesting new edge locations in the form of these small, medium, large size rigs. And today, they're in the process of building a next generation cloud architecture that's completely dispersed. They're using one node, coming out on version 5.5 with Nutanix. They're going to use two nodes, they're going to throw us three nods, multicultural architectures. Day one, they're going to centrally manage it using Prism, with one click upgrades, right? And then on top of that, they're also now provisioning using Calm, purpose built apps for the various locations. So, for example, there will be a re control app at the edge, there's an exploration data lag in Google and so forth. My point being that increasingly this architecture that we're talking about is happening in real time. It's no longer just an existing cellular civilization data center that's being replatformed to look like a private cloud and so forth, or a hybrid cloud. But the fact that you're going into this multi cloud era is getting excel bated, the more someone consumes AWL's GCP or any public cloud, the more they're excel bating their internal transformation to this multi cloud architecture. And so that's what we're going to talk about today, is this construct of ONE OS and ONE Click, and when you think about it, every company has a standard stack. So, this is the only slide you're going to see from me today that's a stack, okay? And if you look at the new release coming out, version 5.5, it's coming out imminently, easiest way to say it is that it's got a ton of functionality. We've jammed as much as we can onto one slide and then build a product basically, okay? But I would encourage you guys to check out the release, it's coming out shortly. And we can go into each and every feature here, we'd be spending a lot of time but the way that we look at building Nutanix products as many of you know, it is not feature at a time. It's experience at a time. And so, when you really look at Nutanix using a lateral view, and that's how we approach problems with our customers and partners. We think about it as a life cycle, all the way from learning to using, operating, and then getting support and experiences. And today, we're going to go through each of these stages with you. And who better to talk about it than our local version of an architect, Steven Poitras please come up on stage. I don't know where you are, Steven come on up. You tucked your shirt in? >> Speaker 2: Just for you guys today. >> Speaker 1: Okay. Alright. He's sort of putting on his weight. I know you used a couple of tight buckles there. But, okay so Steven so I know we're looking for the demo here. So, what we're going to do is, the first step most of you guys know this, is we've been quite successful with CE, it's been a great product. How many of you guys like CE? Come on. Alright. I know you had a hard time downloading it yesterday apparently, there's a bunch of guys had a hard time downloading it. But it's been a great way for us not just to get you guys to experience it, there's more than 25,000 downloads and so forth. But it's also a great way for us to see new features like IEME and so forth. So, keep an eye on CE because we're going to if anything, explode the way that we actually use as a way to get new features out in the next 12 months. Now, one thing beyond CE that we did, and this was something that we did about ... It took us about 12 months to get it out. While people were using CE to learn a lot, a lot of customers were actually getting into full blown competitive evals, right? Especially with hit CI being so popular and so forth. So, we came up with our own version called X-Ray. >> Speaker 2: Yup. >> Speaker 1: What does X-Ray do before we show it? >> Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So, if we think about back in the day we were really the only ACI platform out there on the market. Now there are a few others. So, to basically enable the customer to objectively test these, we came out with X-Ray. And rather than talking about the slide let's go ahead and take a look. Okay, I think it's ready. Perfect. So, here's our X-Ray user interface. And essentially what you do is you specify your targets. So, in this case we have a Nutanix 80150 as well as some of our competitors products which we've actually tested. Now we can see on the left hand side here we see a series of tests. So, what we do is we go through and specify certain workloads like OLTP workloads, database colocation, and while we do that we actually inject certain test cases or scenarios. So, this can be snapshot or component failures. Now one of the key things is having the ability to test these against each other. So, what we see here is we're actually taking a OLTP workload where we're running two virtual machines, and then we can see the IOPS OLTP VM's are actually performing here on the left hand side. Now as we're actually go through this test we perform a series of snapshots, which are identified by these red lines here. Now as you can see, the Nutanix platform, which is shown by this blue line, is purely consistent as we go through this test. However, our competitor's product actually degrades performance overtime as these snapshots are taken. >> Speaker 1: Gotcha. And some of these tests by the way are just not about failure or benchmarking, right? It's a variety of tests that we have that makes real life production workloads. So, every couple of months we actually look at our production workloads out there, subset those two cases and put it into X-Ray. So, X-Ray's one of those that has been more recently announced into the public. But it's already gotten a lot of update. I would strongly encourage you, even if you an existing Nutanix customer. It's a great way to keep us honest, it's a great way for you to actually expand your usage of Nutanix by putting a lot of these real life tests into production, and as and when you look at new alternatives as well, there'll be certain situations that we don't do as well and that's a great way to give us feedback on it. And so, X-Ray is there, the other one, which is more recent by the way is a fact that most of you has spent many days if not weeks, after you've chosen Nutanix, moving non-Nutanix workloads. I.e. VMware, on three tier architectures to Atrio Nutanix. And to do that, we took a hard look and came out with a new product called Xtract. >> Speaker 2: Yeah. So essentially if we think about what Nutanix has done for the data center really enables that iPhone like experience, really bringing it simplicity and intuitiveness to the data center. Now what we wanted to do is to provide that same experience for migrating existing workloads to us. So, with Xtract essentially what we've done is we've scanned your existing environment, we've created design spec, we handled the migration process ... >> Steven: ... environment, we create a design spec. We handle for the migration process as well as the cut over. Now, let's go ahead and take a look in our extract user interface here. What we can see is we have a source environment. In this case, this is a VC environment. This can be any VC, whether it's traditional three tier or hypherconverged. We also see our Nutanix target environments. Essentially, these are our AHV target clusters where we're going to be migrating the data and performing the cut over to you. >> Speaker 2: Gotcha. Steven: The first thing that we do here is we go ahead and create a new migration plan. Here, I'm just going to specify this as DB Wave 2. I'll click okay. What I'm doing here is I'm selecting my target Nutanix cluster, as well as my target Nutanix container. Once I'll do that, I'll click next. Now in this case, we actually like to do it big. We're actually going to migrate some production virtual machines over to this target environment. Here, I'm going to select a few windows instances, which are in our database cluster. I'll click next. At this point, essentially what's occurring is it's going through taking a look at these virtual machines as well as taking a look at the target environment. It takes a look at the resources to ensure that we actually have enough, an ample capacity to facilitate the workload. The next thing we'll do is we'll go ahead and type in our credentials here. This is actually going to be used for logging into the virtual machine. We can do a new device driver installation, as well as get any static IP configuration. Well specify our network mapping. Then from there, we'll click next. What we'll do is we'll actually save and start. This will go through create the migration plan. It'll do some analysis on these virtual machines to ensure that we can actually log in before we actually start migrating data. Here we have a migration, which has been in progress. We can see we have a few virtual machines, obviously some Linux, some Windows here. We've cut over a few. What we do to actually cut over these VMS, is go ahead select the VMS- Speaker 2: This is the actual task of actually doing the final stage of cut over. Steven: Yeah, exactly. That's one of the nice things. Essentially, we can migrate the data whenever we want. We actually hook into the VADP API's to do this. Then every 10 minutes, we send over a delta to sync the data. Speaker 2: Gotcha, gotcha. That's how one click migration can now be possible. This is something that if you guys haven't used this, this has been out in the wild, just for a month or so. Its been probably one of our bestselling, because it's free, bestselling features of the recent product release. I've had customers come to me and say, "Look, there are situations where its taken us weeks to move data." That is now minutes from the operator perspective. Forget where the director, or the VP, it's the line architecture and operator that really loves these tools, which is essentially the core of Nutanix. That's one of our core things, is to make sure that if we can keep the engineer and the architect truly happy, then everything else will be fine for us, right? That's extract. Then we have a lot of things, right? We've done the usual things, there's a tunnel functionality on day zero, day one, day two, kind of capabilities. Why don't we start with something around Prism Central, now that we can do one click PC installs? We can do PC scale outs, we can go from managing thousands of VMS, tens of thousands of VMS, while doing all the one click operations, right? Steven: Yep. Speaker 2: Why don't we take a quick look at what's new in Prism Central? Steven: Yep. Absolutely. Here, we can see our Prism element interface. As you mentioned, one of the key things we added here was the ability to deploy Prism Central very simply just with a few clicks. We'll actually go through a distributed PC scale of deployment here. Here, we're actually going to deploy, as this is a new instance. We're going to select our 5.5 version. In this case, we're going to deploy a scale out Prism Central cluster. Obviously, availability and up-time's very critical for us, as we're mainly distributed systems. In this case we're going to deploy a scale-out PC cluster. Here we'll select our number of PC virtual machines. Based upon the number of VMS, we can actually select our size of VM that we'd deploy. If we want to deploy 25K's report, we can do that as well. Speaker 2: Basically a thousand to tens of thousands of VM's are possible now. Steven: Yep. That's a nice thing is you can start small, and then scale out as necessary. We'll select our PC network. Go ahead and input our IP address. Now, we'll go to deploy. Now, here we can see it's actually kicked off the deployment, so it'll go provision these virtual machines to apply the configuration. In a few minutes, we'll be up and running. Speaker 2: Right. While Steven's doing that, one of the things that we've obviously invested in is a ton of making VM operations invisible. Now with Calm's, what we've done is to up level that abstraction. Two applications. At the end of the day, more and more ... when you go to AWS, when you go to GCP, you go to [inaudible 01:04:56], right? The level of abstractions now at an app level, it's cloud formations, and so forth. Essentially, what Calm's able to do is to give you this marketplace that you can go in and self-service [inaudible 01:05:05], create this internal cloud like environment for your end users, whether it be business owners, technology users to self-serve themselves. The process is pretty straightforward. You, as an operator, or an architect, or [inaudible 01:05:16] create these blueprints. Consumers within the enterprise, whether they be self-service users, whether they'll be end business users, are able to consume them for a simple marketplace, and deploy them on whether it be a private cloud using Nutanix, or public clouds using anything with public choices. Then, as a single frame of glass, as operators you're doing conversed operations, at an application centric level between [inaudible 01:05:41] across any of these clouds. It's this combination of producer, consumer, operator in a curated sense. Much like an iPhone with an app store. It's the core construct that we're trying to get with Calm to up level the abstraction interface across multiple clouds. Maybe we'll do a quick demo of this, and then get into the rest of the stuff, right? Steven: Sure. Let's check it out. Here we have our Prism Central user interface. We can see we have two Nutanix clusters, our cloudy04 as well as our Power8 cluster. One of the key things here that we've added is this apps tab. I'm clicking on this apps tab, we can see that we have a few [inaudible 01:06:19] solutions, we have a TensorFlow solution, a [inaudible 01:06:22] et cetera. The nice thing about this is, this is essentially a marketplace where vendors as well as developers could produce these blueprints for consumption by the public. Now, let's actually go ahead and deploy one of these blueprints. Here we have a HR employment engagement app. We can see we have three different tiers of services part of this. Speaker 2: You need a lot of engagement at HR, you know that. Okay, keep going. Steven: Then the next thing we'll do here is we'll go and click on. Based upon this, we'll specify our blueprint name, HR app. The nice thing when I'm deploying is I can actually put in back doors. We'll click clone. Now what we can see here is our blueprint editor. As a developer, I could actually go make modifications, or even as an in-user given the simple intuitive user interface. Speaker 2: This is the consumers side right here, but it's also the [inaudible 01:07:11]. Steven: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, if I wanted to make any modifications, I could select the tier, I could scale out the number of instances, I could modify the packages. Then to actually deploy, all I do is click launch, specify HR app, and click create. Speaker 2: Awesome. Again, this is coming in 5.5. There's one other feature, by the way, that is coming in 5.5 that's surrounding Calm, and Prism Pro, and everything else. That seems to be a much awaited feature for us. What was that? Steven: Yeah. Obviously when we think about multi-tenant, multi-cloud role based access control is a very critical piece of that. Obviously within the organization, we're going to have multiple business groups, multiple units. Our back's a very critical piece. Now, if we go over here to our projects, we can see in this scenario we just have a single project. What we've added is if you want to specify certain roles, in this case we're going to add our good friend John Doe. We can add them, it could be a user or group, but then we specify their role. We can give a developer the ability to edit and create these blueprints, or consumer the ability to actually provision based upon. Speaker 2: Gotcha. Basically in 5.5, you'll have role based access control now in Prism and Calm burned into that, that I believe it'll support custom role shortly after. Steven: Yep, okay. Speaker 2: Good stuff, good stuff. I think this is where the Nutanix guys are supposed to clap, by the way, so that the rest of the guys can clap. Steven: Thank you, thank you. Okay. What do we have? Speaker 2: We have day one stuff, obviously there's a ton of stuff that's coming in core data path capabilities that most of you guys use. One of the most popular things is synchronous replication, especially in Europe. Everybody wants to do [Metro 01:08:49] for whatever reason. But we've got something new, something even more enhanced than Metro, right? Steven: Yep. Speaker 2: Do you want to talk a little bit about it? Steven: Yeah, let's talk about it. If we think about what we had previously, we started out with a synchronous replication. This is essentially going to be your higher RPO. Then we moved into Metro cluster, which was RPO zero. Those are two ins of the gamete. What we did is we introduced new synchronous replication, which really gives you the best of both worlds where you have very, very decreased RPO's, but zero impact in line mainstream performance. Speaker 2: That's it. Let's show something. Steven: Yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Here, we're back at our Prism Element interface. We'll go over here. At this point, we provisioned our HR app, the next thing we need to do is to protect that data. Let's go here to protection domain. We'll create a new PD for our HR app. Speaker 2: You clearly love HR. Steven: Spent a lot of time there. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steven: Here, you can see we have our production lamp DBVM. We'll go ahead and protect that entity. We can see that's protected. The next thing we'll do is create a schedule. Now, what would you say would be a good schedule we should actually shoot for? Speaker 2: I don't know, 15 minutes? Steven: 15 minutes is not bad. But I ... Section 7 of 13 [01:00:00 - 01:10:04] Section 8 of 13 [01:10:00 - 01:20:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Speaker 1: ... 15 minutes. Speaker 2: 15 minutes is not bad, but I think the people here deserve much better than that, so I say let's shoot for ... what about 15 seconds? Speaker 1: Yeah. They definitely need a bathroom break, so let's do 15 seconds. Speaker 2: Alright, let's do 15 seconds. Speaker 1: Okay, sounds good. Speaker 2: K. Then we'll select our retention policy and remote cluster replicate to you, which in this case is wedge. And we'll go ahead and create the schedule here. Now at this point we can see our protection domain. Let's go ahead and look at our entities. We can see our database virtual machine. We can see our 15 second schedule, our local snapshots, as well as we'll start seeing our remote snapshots. Now essentially what occurs is we take two very quick snapshots to essentially see the initial data, and then based upon that then we'll start taking our continuous 15 second snaps. Speaker 1: 15 seconds snaps, and obviously near sync has less of impact than synchronous, right? From an architectural perspective. Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's a nice thing is essentially within the cluster it's truly pure synchronous, but externally it's just a lagged a-sync. Speaker 1: Gotcha. So there you see some 15 second snapshots. So near sync is also built into five-five, it's a long-awaited feature. So then, when we expand in the rest of capabilities, I would say, operations. There's a lot of you guys obviously, have started using Prism Pro. Okay, okay, you can clap. You can clap. It's okay. It was a lot of work, by the way, by the core data pad team, it was a lot of time. So Prism Pro ... I don't know if you guys know this, Prism Central now run from zero percent to more than 50 percent attach on install base, within 18 months. And normally that's a sign of true usage, and true value being supported. And so, many things are new in five-five out on Prism Pro starting with the fact that you can do data[inaudible 01:11:49] base lining, alerting, so that you're not capturing a ton of false positives and tons of alerts. We go beyond that, because we have this core machine-learning technology power, we call it cross fit. And, what we've done is we've used that as a foundation now for pretty much all kinds of operations benefits such as auto RCA, where you're able to actually map to particular [inaudible 01:12:12] crosses back to who's actually causing it whether it's the network, a computer, and so forth. But then the last thing that we've also done in five-five now that's quite different shading, is the fact that you can now have a lot of these one-click recommendations and remediations, such as right-sizing, the fact that you can actually move around [inaudible 01:12:28] VMs, constrained VMs, and so forth. So, I now we've packed a lot of functionality in Prism Pro, so why don't we spend a couple of minutes quickly giving a sneak peak into a few of those things. Speaker 2: Yep, definitely. So here we're back at our Prism Central interface and one of the things we've added here, if we take a look at one of our clusters, we can see we have this new anomalies portion here. So, let's go ahead and select that and hop into this. Now let's click on one of these anomaly events. Now, essentially what the system does is we monitor all the entities and everything running within the system, and then based upon that, we can actually determine what we expect the band of values for these metrics to be. So in this scenario, we can see we have a CPU usage anomaly event. So, normal time, we expect this to be right around 86 to 100 percent utilization, but at this point we can see this is drastically dropped from 99 percent to near zero. So, this might be a point as an administrator that I want to go check out this virtual machine, ensure that certain services and applications are still up and running. Speaker 1: Gotcha, and then also it changes the baseline based on- Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, so essentially we apply machine-learning techniques to this, so the system will dynamically adjust based upon the value adjustment. Speaker 1: Gotcha. What else? Speaker 2: Yep. So the other thing here that we mentioned was capacity planning. So if we go over here, we can take a look at our runway. So in this scenario we have about 30 days worth of runway, which is most constrained by memory. Now, obviously, more nodes is all good for everyone, but we also want to ensure that you get the maximum value on your investment. So here we can actually see a few recommendations. We have 11 overprovision virtual machines. These are essentially VMs which have more resources than are necessary. As well as 19 inactives, so these are dead VMs essentially that haven't been powered on and not utilized. We can also see we have six constrained, as well as one bully. So, constrained VMs are essentially VMs which are requesting more resources than they actually have access to. This could be running at 100 percent CPU utilization, or 100 percent memory, or storage utilization. So we could actually go in and modify these. Speaker 1: Gotcha. So these are all part of the auto remediation capabilities that are now possible? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: What else, do you want to take reporting? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so I know reporting is a very big thing, so if we think about it, we can't rely on an administrator to constantly go into Prism. We need to provide some mechanism to allow them to get emailed reports. So what we've done is we actually autogenerate reports which can be sent via email. So we'll go ahead and add one of these sample reports which was created today. And here we can actually get specific detailed information about our cluster without actually having to go into Prism to get this. Speaker 1: And you can customize these reports and all? Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, if we hop over here and click on our new report, we can actually see a list of views we could add to these reports, and we can mix and match and customize as needed. Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's the operational side. Now we also have new services like AFS which has been quite popular with many of you folks. We've had hundreds of customers already on it live with SMB functionality. You want to show a couple of things that is new in five-five? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yep, definitely. So ... let's wait for my screen here. So one of the key things is if we looked at that runway tab, what we saw is we had over a year's worth of storage capacity. So, what we saw is customers had the requirement for filers, they had some excess storage, so why not actually build a software featured natively into the cluster. And that's essentially what we've done with AFS. So here we can see we have our AFS cluster, and one of the key things is the ability to scale. So, this particular cluster has around 3.1 or 3.16 billion files, which are running on this AFS cluster, as well as around 3,000 active concurrent sessions. Speaker 1: So basically thousands of concurrent sessions with billions of files? Speaker 2: Yeah, and the nice thing with this is this is actually only a four node Nutanix cluster, so as the cluster actually scales, these numbers will actually scale linearly as a function of those nodes. Speaker 1: Gotcha, gotcha. There's got to be one more bullet here on this slide so what's it about? Speaker 2: Yeah so, obviously the initial use case was realistically for home folders as well as user profiles. That was a good start, but it wasn't the only thing. So what we've done is we've actually also introduced important and upcoming release of NFS. So now you can now use NFS to also interface with our [crosstalk 01:16:44]. Speaker 1: NFS coming soon with AFS by the way, it's a big deal. Big deal. So one last thing obviously, as you go operationalize it, we've talked a lot of things on features and functions but one of the cool things that's always been seminal to this company is the fact that we all for really good customer service and support experience. Right now a lot of it is around the product, the people, the support guys, and so forth. So fundamentally to the product we have found ways using Pulse to instrument everything. With Pulse HD that has been allowed for a little bit longer now. We have fine grain [inaudible 01:17:20] around everything that's being done, so if you turn on this functionality you get a lot of information now that we built, we've used when you make a phone call, or an email, and so forth. There's a ton of context now available to support you guys. What we've now done is taken that and are now externalizing it for your own consumption, so that you don't have to necessarily call support. You can log in, look at your entire profile across your own alerts, your own advisories, your own recommendations. You can look at collective intelligence now that's coming soon which is the fact that look, here are 50 other customers just like you. These are the kinds of customers that are using workloads like you, what are their configuration profiles? Through this centralized customer insights portal you going to get a lot more insight, not just about your own operations, but also how everybody else is also using it. So let's take a quick look at that upcoming functionality. Speaker 2: Yep. Absolutely. So this is our customer 360 portal, so as [inaudible 01:18:18] mentioned, as a customer I can actually log in here, I can get a high-level overview of my existing environment, my cases, the status of those cases, as well as any relevant announcements. So, here based upon my cluster version, if there's any updates which are available, I can then see that here immediately. And then one of the other things that we've added here is this insights page. So essentially this is information that previously support would leverage to essentially proactively look out to the cluster, but now we've exposed this to you as the customer. So, clicking on this insights tab we can see an overview of our environment, in this case we have three Nutanix clusters, right around 550 virtual machines, and over here what's critical is we can actually see our cases. And one of the nice things about this is these area all autogenerated by the cluster itself, so no human interaction, no manual intervention was required to actually create these alerts. The cluster itself will actually facilitate that, send it over to support, and then support can get back out to you automatically. Speaker 1: K, so look for customer insights coming soon. And obviously that's the full life cycle. One cool thing though that's always been unique to Nutanix was the fact that we had [inaudible 01:19:28] security from day one built-in. And [inaudible 01:19:31] chunk of functionality coming in five-five just around this, because every release we try to insert more and more security capabilities, and the first one is around data. What are we doing? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So previously we had support for data at rest encryption, but this did have the requirement to leverage self-encrypting drives. These can be very expensive, so what we've done, typical to our fashion is we've actually built this in natively via software. So, here within Prism Element, I can go to data at rest encryption, and then I can go and edit this configuration here. Section 8 of 13 [01:10:00 - 01:20:04] Section 9 of 13 [01:20:00 - 01:30:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Steve: Encryption and then I can go and edit this configuration here. From here I could add my CSR's. I can specify KMS server and leverage native software base encryption without the requirement of SED's. Sunil: Awesome. So data address encryption [inaudible 01:20:15] coming soon, five five. Now data security is only one element, the other element was around network security obviously. We've always had this request about what are we doing about networking, what are we doing about network, and our philosophy has always been simple and clear, right. It is that the problem in networking is not the data plan. Problem in networking is the control plan. As in, if a packing loss happens to the top of an ax switch, what do we do? If there's a misconfigured board, what do we do? So we've invested a lot in full blown new network visualization that we'll show you a preview of that's all new in five five, but then once you can visualize you can take action, so you can actually using our netscape API's now in five five. You can optovision re lands on the switch, you can update reps on your load balancing pools. You can update obviously rules on your firewall. And then we've taken that to the next level, which is beyond all that, just let you go to AWS right now, what do you do? You take 100 VM's, you put it in an AWS security group, boom. That's how you get micro segmentation. You don't need to buy expensive products, you don't need to virtualize your network to get micro segmentation. That's what we're doing with five five, is built in one click micro segmentation. That's part of the core product, so why don't we just quickly show that. Okay? Steve: Yeah, let's take a look. So if we think about where we've been so far, we've done the comparison test, we've done a migration over to a Nutanix. We've deployed our new HR app. We've protected it's data, now we need to protect the network's. So one of the things you'll see that's new here is this security policies. What we'll do is we'll actually go ahead and create a new security policy and we'll just say this is HR security policy. We'll specify the application type, which in this case is HR. Sunil: HR of course. Steve: Yep and we can see our app instance is automatically populated, so based upon the number of running instances of that blueprint, that would populate that drop-down. Now we'll go ahead and click next here and what we can see in the middle is essentially those three tiers that composed that app blueprint. Now one of the important things is actually figuring out what's trying to communicate with this within my existing environment. So if I take a look over here on my left hand side, I can essentially see a few things. I can see a Ha Proxy load balancer is trying to communicate with my app here, that's all good. I want to allow that. I can see some sort of monitoring service is trying to communicate with all three of the tiers. That's good as well. Now the last thing I can see here is this IP address which is trying to access my database. Now, that's not designed and that's not supposed to happen, so what we'll do is we'll actually take a look and see what it's doing. Now hopping over to this database virtual machine or the hack VM, what we can see is it's trying to perform a brute force log in attempt to my MySQL database. This is not good. We can see obviously it can connect on the socket, however, it hasn't guessed the right password. In order to lock that down, we'll go back to our policies here and we're going to click deny. Once we've done that, we'll click next and now we'll go to Apply Now. Now we can see our newly created security policy and if we hop back over to this VM, we can now see it's actually timing out and what this means is that it's not able to communicate with that database virtual machine due to micro segmentation actively blocking that request. Sunil: Gotcha and when you go back to the Prism site, essentially what we're saying now is, it's as simple as that, to set up micro segmentation now inside your existing clusters. So that's one click micro segmentation, right. Good stuff. One other thing before we let Steve walk off the stage and then go to the bathroom, but is you guys know Steve, you know he spends a lot time in the gym, you do. Right. He and I share cubes right beside each other by the way just if you ever come to San Jose Nutanix corporate headquarters, you're always welcome. Come to the fourth floor and you'll see Steve and Sunil beside each other, most of the time I'm not in the cube, most of the time he's in the gym. If you go to his cube, you'll see all kinds of stuff. Okay. It's true, it's true, but the reason why I brought this up, was Steve recently became a father, his first kid. Oh by the way this is, clicker, this is how his cube looks like by the way but he left his wife and his new born kid to come over here to show us a demo, so give him a round of applause. Thank you, sir. Steve: Cool, thanks, Sunil. That was fun. Sunil: Thank you. Okay, so lots of good stuff. Please try out five five, give us feedback as you always do. A lot of sessions, a lot of details, have fun hopefully for the rest of the day. To talk about how their using Nutanix, you know here's one of our favorite customers and partners. He normally comes with sunglasses, I've asked him that I have to be the best looking guy on stage in my keynotes, so he's going to try to reduce his charm a little bit. Please come on up, Alessandro. Thank you. Alessandro R.: I'm delighted to be here, thank you so much. Sunil: Maybe we can stand here, tell us a little bit about Leonardo. Alessandro R.: About Leonardo, Leonardo is a key actor of the aerospace defense and security systems. Helicopters, aircraft, the fancy systems, the fancy electronics, weapons unfortunately, but it's also a global actor in high technology field. The security information systems division that is the division I belong to, 3,000 people located in Italy and in UK and there's several other countries in Europe and the U.S. $1 billion dollar of revenue. It has a long a deep experience in information technology, communications, automation, logical and physical security, so we have quite a long experience to expand. I'm in charge of the security infrastructure business side. That is devoted to designing, delivering, managing, secure infrastructures services and secure by design solutions and platforms. Sunil: Gotcha. Alessandro R.: That is. Sunil: Gotcha. Some of your focus obviously in recent times has been delivering secure cloud services obviously. Alessandro R.: Yeah, obviously. Sunil: Versus traditional infrastructure, right. How did Nutanix help you in some of that? Alessandro R.: I can tell something about our recent experience about that. At the end of two thousand ... well, not so recent. Sunil: Yeah, yeah. Alessandro R.: At the end of 2014, we realized and understood that we had to move a step forward, a big step and a fast step, otherwise we would drown. At that time, our newly appointed CEO confirmed that the IT would be a core business to Leonardo and had to be developed and grow. So we decided to start our digital transformation journey and decided to do it in a structured and organized way. Having clear in mind our targets. We launched two programs. One analysis program and one deployments programs that were essentially transformation programs. We had to renew ourselves in terms of service models, in terms of organization, in terms of skills to invest upon and in terms of technologies to adopt. We were stacking a certification of technologies that adopted, companies merged in the years before and we have to move forward and to rationalize all these things. So we spent a lot of time analyzing, comparing technologies, and evaluating what would fit to us. We had two main targets. The first one to consolidate and centralize the huge amount of services and infrastructure that were spread over 52 data centers in Italy, for Leonardo itself. The second one, to update our service catalog with a bunch of cloud services, so we decided to update our data centers. One of our building block of our new data center architecture was Nutanix. We evaluated a lot, we had spent a lot of time in analysis, so that wasn't a bet, but you are quite pioneers at those times. Sunil: Yeah, you took a lot of risk right as an Italian company- Alessandro R.: At this time, my colleague used to say, "Hey, Alessandro, think it over, remember that not a CEO has ever been fired for having chose IBM." I apologize, Bob, but at that time, when Nutanix didn't run on [inaudible 01:29:27]. We have still a good bunch of [inaudible 01:29:31] in our data center, so that will be the chance to ... Audience Member: [inaudible 01:29:37] Alessandro R.: So much you must [inaudible 01:29:37] what you announced it. Sunil: So you took a risk and you got into it. Alessandro R.: Yes, we got into, we are very satisfied with the results we have reached. Sunil: Gotcha. Alessandro R.: Most of the targets we expected to fulfill have come and so we are satisfied, but that doesn't mean that we won't go on asking you a big discount ... Sunil: Sure, sure, sure, sure. Alessandro R.: On price list. Sunil: Sure, sure, so what's next in terms of I know there are some interesting stuff that you're thinking. Alessandro R.: The next- Section 9 of 13 [01:20:00 - 01:30:04] Section 10 of 13 [01:30:00 - 01:40:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Speaker 1: So what's next, in terms of I know you have some interesting stuff that you're thinking of. Speaker 2: The next, we have to move forward obviously. The name Leonardo is inspired to Leonardo da Vinci, it was a guy that in terms of innovation and technology innovation had some good ideas. And so, I think, that Leonardo with Nutanix could go on in following an innovation target and following really mutual ... Speaker 1: Partnership. Speaker 2: Useful partnership, yes. We surely want to investigate the micro segmentation technologies you showed a minute ago because we have some looking, particularly by the economical point of view ... Speaker 1: Yeah, the costs and expenses. Speaker 2: And we have to give an alternative to the technology we are using. We want to use more intensively AHV, again as an alternative solution we are using. We are selecting a couple of services, a couple of quite big projects to build using AHV talking of Calm we are very eager to understand the announcement that they are going to show to all of us because the solution we are currently using is quite[crosstalk 01:31:30] Speaker 1: Complicated. Speaker 2: Complicated, yeah. To move a step of automation to elaborate and implement[inaudible 01:31:36] you spend 500 hours of manual activities that's nonsense so ... Speaker 1: Manual automation. Speaker 2: (laughs) Yes, and in the end we are very interested also in the prism features, mostly the new features that you ... Speaker 1: Talked about. Speaker 2: You showed yesterday in the preview because one bit of benefit that we received from the solution in the operations field means a bit plus, plus to our customer and a distinctive plus to our customs so we are very interested in that ... Speaker 1: Gotcha, gotcha. Thanks for taking the risk, thanks for being a customer and partner. Speaker 2: It has been a pleasure. Speaker 1: Appreciate it. Speaker 2: Bless you, bless you. Speaker 1: Thank you. So, you know obviously one OS, one click was one of our core things, as you can see the tagline doesn't stop there, it also says "any cloud". So, that's the rest of the presentation right now it's about; what are we doing, to now fulfill on that mission of one OS, one cloud, one click with one support experience across any cloud right? And there you know, we talked about Calm. Calm is not only just an operational experience for your private cloud but as you can see it's a one-click experience where you can actually up level your apps, set up blueprints, put SLA's and policies, push them down to either your AWS, GCP all your [inaudible 01:33:00] environments and then on day one while you can do one click provisioning, day two and so forth you will see new and new capabilities such as, one-click migration and mobility seeping into the product. Because, that's the end game for Calm, is to actually be your cloud autonomy platform right? So, you can choose the right cloud for the right workload. And talk about how they're building a multi cloud architecture using Nutanix and partnership a great pleasure to introduce my other good Italian friend Daniele, come up on stage please. From Telecom Italia Sparkle. How are you sir? Daniele: Not too bad thank you. Speaker 1: You want an espresso, cappuccino? Daniele: No, no later. Speaker 1: You all good? Okay, tell us a little about Sparkle. Daniele: Yeah, Sparkle is a fully owned subsidy of Telecom Italia group. Speaker 1: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Daniele: Spinned off in 2003 with the mission to develop the wholesale and multinational corporate and enterprise business abroad. Huge network, as you can see, hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optics spread between; south east Asia to Europe to the U.S. Most of it proprietary part of it realized on some running cables. Part of them proprietary part of them bilateral part of them[inaudible 01:34:21] with other operators. 37 countries in which we have offices in the world, 700 employees, lean and clean company ... Speaker 1: Wow, just 700 employees for all of this. Daniele: Yep, 1.4 billion revenues per year more or less. Speaker 1: Wow, are you a public company? Daniele: No, fully owned by TIM so far. Speaker 1: So, what is your experience with Nutanix so far? Daniele: Well, in a way similar to what Alessandro was describing. To operate such a huge network as you can see before, and to keep on bringing revenues for the wholesale market, while trying to turn the bar toward the enterprise in a serious way. Couple of years ago the management team realized that we had to go through a serious transformation, not just technological but in terms of the way we build the services to our customers. In terms of how we let our customer feel the Sparkle experience. So, we are moving towards cloud but we are moving towards cloud with connectivity attached to it because it's in our cord as a provider of Telecom services. The paradigm that is driving today is the on-demand, is the dynamic and in order to get these things we need to move to software. Most of the network must become invisible as the Nutanix way. So, we decided instead of creating patchworks onto our existing systems, infrastructure, OSS, BSS and network systems, to build a new data center from scratch. And the paradigm being this new data center, the mantra was; everything is software designed, everything must be easy to manage, performance capacity planning, everything must be predictable and everything to be managed by few people. Nutanix is at the moment the baseline of this data center for what concern, let's say all the new networking tools, meaning as the end controllers that are taking care of automation and programmability of the network. Lifecycle service orchestrator, network orchestrator, cloud automation and brokerage platform and everything at the moment runs on AHV because we are forcing our vendors to certify their application on AHV. The only stack that is not at the moment AHV based is on a specific cloud platform because there we were really looking for the multi[inaudible 01:37:05]things that you are announcing today. So, we hope to do the migration as soon as possible. Speaker 1: Gotcha, gotcha. And then looking forward you're going to build out some more data center space, expose these services Daniele: Yeah. Speaker 1: For the customers as well as your internal[crosstalk 01:37:21] Daniele: Yeah, basically yes for sure we are going to consolidate, to invest more in the data centers in the markets on where we are leader. Italy, Turkey and Greece we are big data centers for [inaudible 01:37:33] and cloud, but we believe that the cloud with all the issues discussed this morning by Diraj, that our locality, customer proximity ... we think as a global player having more than 120 pops all over the world, which becomes more than 1000 in partnerships, that the pop can easily be transformed in a data center, so that we want to push the customer experience of what we develop in our main data centers closer to them. So, that we can combine traditional infrastructure as a service with the new connectivity services every single[inaudible 01:38:18] possibly everything running. Speaker 1: I mean, it makes sense, I mean I think essentially in some ways to summarize it's the example of an edge cloud where you're pushing a micro-cloud closer to the customers edge. Daniele: Absolutely. Speaker 1: Great stuff man, thank you so much, thank you so much. Daniele: Pleasure, pleasure. Thank you. Speaker 1: So, you know a couple of other things before we get in the next demo is the fact that in addition to Calm from multi-cloud management we have Zai, we talked about for extended enterprise capabilities and something for you guys to quickly understand why we have done this. In a very simple way is if you think about your enterprise data center, clearly you have a bunch of apps there, a bunch of public clouds and when you look at the paradigm you currently deploy traditional apps, we call them mode one apps, SAP, Exchange and so forth on your enterprise. Then you have next generation apps whether it be [inaudible 01:39:11] space, whether it be Doob or whatever you want to call it, lets call them mode two apps right? And when you look at these two types of apps, which are the predominant set, most enterprises have a combination of mode one and mode two apps, most public clouds primarily are focused, initially these days on mode two apps right? And when people talk about app mobility, when people talk about cloud migration, they talk about lift and shift, forklift [inaudible 01:39:41]. And that's a hard problem I mean, it's happening but it's a hard problem and ends up that its just not a one time thing. Once you've forklift, once you move you have different tooling, different operation support experience, different stacks. What if for some of your applications that mattered ... Section 10 of 13 [01:30:00 - 01:40:04] Section 11 of 13 [01:40:00 - 01:50:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Speaker 1: What if, for some of your applications that matter to you, that are your core enterprise apps that you can retain the same toolimg, the same operational experience and so forth. And that is what we achieve to do with Xi. It is truly making hybrid invisible, which is a next act for this company. It'll take us a few years to really fulfill the vision here, but the idea here is that you shouldn't think about public cloud as a different silo. You should think of it as an extension of your enterprise data centers. And for any services such as DR, whether it would be dev test, whether it be back-up, and so-forth. You can use the same tooling, same experience, get a public cloud-like capability without lift and shift, right? So it's making this lift and shift invisible by, soft of, homogenizing the data plan, the network plan, the control plan is what we really want to do with Xi. Okay? And we'll show you some more details here. But the simplest way to understand this is, think of it as the iPhone, right? D has mentioned this a little bit. This is how we built this experience. Views IOS as the core, IP, we wrap it up with a great package called the iPhone. But then, a few years into the iPhone era, came iTunes and iCloud. There's no apps, per se. That's fused into IOS. And similarly, think about Xi that way. The more you move VMs, into an internet-x environment, stuff like DR comes burnt into the fabric. And to give us a sneak peek into a bunch of the com and Xi cable days, let me bring back Binny who's always a popular guys on stage. Come on up, Binny. I'd be surprised in Binny untucked his shirt. He's always tucking in his shirt. Binny Gill: Okay, yeah. Let's go. Speaker 1: So first thing is com. And to show how we can actually deploy apps, not just across private and public clouds, but across multiple public clouds as well. Right? Binny Gill: Yeah, basically, you know com is about simplifying the disparity between various public clouds out there. So it's very important for us to be able to take one application blueprint and then quickly deploy in whatever cloud of your choice. Without understanding how one cloud is different. Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the goal. Binny Gill: So here, if you can see, I have market list. And by the way, this market list is a great partner community interest. And every single sort of apps come up here. Let me take a sample app here, Hadoop. And click launch. And now where do you want me to deploy? Speaker 1: Let's start at GCP. Binny Gill: GCP, okay. So I click on GCP, and let me give it a name. Hadoop. GCP. Say 30, right. Clear. So this is one click deployment of anything from our marketplace on to a cloud of your choice. Right now, what the system is doing, is taking the intent-filled description of what the application should look like. Not just the infrastructure level but also within the merchant machines. And it's creating a set of work flows that it needs to go deploy. So as you can see, while we were talking, it's loading the application. Making sure that the provisioning workflows are all set up. Speaker 1: And so this is actually, in real time it's actually extracting out some of the GCP requirements. It's actually talking to GCP. Setting up the constructs so that we can actually push it up on the GCP personally. Binny Gill: Right. So it takes a couple of minutes. It'll provision. Let me go back and show you. Say you worked with deploying AWS. So you Hadoop. Hit address. And that's it. So again, the same work flow. Speaker 1: Same process, I see. Binny Gill: It's going to now deploy in AWS. Speaker 1: See one of the keys things is that we actually extracted out all the isms of each of these clouds into this logical substrate. Binny Gill: Yep. Speaker 1: That you can now piggy-back off of. Binny Gill: Absolutely. And it makes it extremely simple for the average consumer. And you know we like more cloud support here over time. Speaker 1: Sounds good. Binny Gill: Now let me go back and show you an app that I had already deployed. Now 13 days ago. It's on GCP. And essentially what I want to show you is what is the view of the application. Firstly, it shows you the cost summary. Hourly, daily, and how the cost is going to look like. The other is how you manage it. So you know one click ways of upgrading, scaling out, starting, deleting, and so on. Speaker 1: So common actions, but independent of the type of clouds. Binny Gill: Independent. And also you can act with these actions over time. Right? Then services. It's learning two services, Hadoop slave and Hadoop master. Hadoop slave runs fast right now. And auditing. It shows you what are the important actions you've taken on this app. Not just, for example, on the IS front. This is, you know how the VMs were created. But also if you scroll down, you know how the application was deployed and brought up. You know the slaves have to discover each other, and so on. Speaker 1: Yeah got you. So find game invisibility into whatever you were doing with clouds because that's been one of the complaints in general. Is that the cloud abstractions have been pretty high level. Binny Gill: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Binny Gill: Yeah. So that's how we make the differences between the public clouds. All go away for the Indias of ... Speaker 1: Got you. So why don't we now give folks ... Now a lot of this stuff is coming in five, five so you'll see that pretty soon. You'll get your hands around it with AWS and tree support and so forth. What we wanted to show you was emerging alpha version that is being baked. So is a real production code for Xi. And why don't we just jump right in to it. Because we're running short of time. Binny Gill: Yep. Speaker 1: Give folks a flavor for what the production level code is already being baked around. Binny Gill: Right. So the idea of the design is make sure it's not ... the public cloud is no longer any different from your private cloud. It's a true seamless extension of your private cloud. Here I have my test environment. As you can see I'm running the HR app. It has the DB tier and the Web tier. Yeah. Alright? And the DB tier is running Oracle DB. Employee payroll is the Web tier. And if you look at the availability zones that I have, this is my data center. Now I want to protect this application, right? From disaster. What do I do? I need another data center. Speaker 1: Sure. Binny Gill: Right? With Xi, what we are doing is ... You go here and click on Xi Cloud Services. Speaker 1: And essentially as the slide says, you are adding AZs with one click. Binny Gill: Yeps so this is what I'm going to do. Essentially, you log in using your existing my.nutanix.com credentials. So here I'm going to use my guest credentials and log in. Now while I'm logging in what's happening is we are creating a seamless network between the two sides. And then making the Xi cloud availability zone appear. As if it was my own. Right? Speaker 1: Gotcha. Binny Gill: So in a couple of seconds what you'll notice this list is here now I don't have just one availability zone, but another one appears. Speaker 1: So you have essentially, real time now, paid a one data center doing an availability zone. Binny Gill: Yep. Speaker 1: Cool. Okay. Let's see what else we can do. Binny Gill: So now you think about VR setup. Now I'm armed with another data center, let's do DR Center. Now DR set-up is going to be extremely simple. Speaker 1: Okay but it's also based because on the fact that it is the same stack on both sides. Right? Binny Gill: It's the same stack on both sides. We have a secure network lane connecting the two sides, on top of the secure network plane. Now data can flow back and forth. So now applications can go back and forth, securely. Speaker 1: Gotcha, okay. Let's look at one-click DR. Binny Gill: So for one-click DR set-up. A couple of things we need to know. One is a protection rule. This is the RPO, where does it apply to? Right? And the connection of the replication. The other one is recovery plans, in case disaster happens. You know, how do I bring up my machines and application work-order and so on. So let me first show you, Protection Rule. Right? So here's the protection rule. I'll create one right now. Let me call it Platinum. Alright, and source is my own data center. Destination, you know Xi appears now. Recovery point objective, so maybe in a one hour these snapshots going to the public cloud. I want to retain three in the public side, three locally. And now I select what are the entities that I want to protect. Now instead of giving VMs my name, what I can do is app type employee payroll, app type article database. It covers both the categories of the application tiers that I have. And save. Speaker 1: So one of the things here, by the way I don't know if you guys have noticed this, more and more of Nutanix's constructs are being eliminated to become app-centric. Of course is VM centric. And essentially what that allows one to do is to create that as the new service-level API/abstraction. So that under the cover over a period of time, you may be VMs today, maybe containers tomorrow. Or functions, the day after. Binny Gill: Yep. What I just did was all that needs to be done to set up replication from your own data center to Xi. So we started off with no data center to actually replication happening. Speaker 1: Gotcha. Binny Gill: Okay? Speaker 1: No, no. You want to set up some recovery plans? Binny Gill: Yeah so now set up recovery plan. Recovery plans are going to be extremely simple. You select a bunch of VMs or apps, and then there you can say what are the scripts you want to run. What order in which you want to boot things. And you know, you can set up access these things with one click monthly or weekly and so on. Speaker 1: Gotcha. And that sets up the IPs as well as subnets and everything. Binny Gill: So you have the option. You can maintain the same IPs on frame as the move to Xi. Or you can make them- Speaker 1: Remember, you can maintain your own IPs when you actually use the Xi service. There was a lot of things getting done to actually accommodate that capability. Binny Gill: Yeah. Speaker 1: So let's take a look at some of- Binny Gill: You know, the same thing as VPC, for example. Speaker 1: Yeah. Binny Gill: You need to possess on Xi. So, let's create a recovery plan. A recovery plan you select the destination. Where does the recovery happen. Now, after that Section 11 of 13 [01:40:00 - 01:50:04] Section 12 of 13 [01:50:00 - 02:00:04] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Speaker 1: ... does the recovery happen. Now, after that you have to think of what is the runbook that you want to run when disaster happens, right? So you're preparing for that, so let me call "HR App Recovery." The next thing is the first stage. We're doing the first stage, let me add some entities by categories. I want to bring up my database first, right? Let's click on the database and that's it. Speaker 2: So essentially, you're building the script now. Speaker 1: Building the script- Speaker 2: ... on the [inaudible 01:50:30] Speaker 1: ... but in a visual way. It's simple for folks to understand. You can add custom script, add delay and so on. Let me add another stage and this stage is about bringing up the web tier after the database is up. Speaker 2: So basically, bring up the database first, then bring up the web tier, et cetera, et cetera, right? Speaker 1: That's it. I've created a recovery plan. I mean usually it's complicated stuff, but we made it extremely simple. Now if you click on "Recovery Points," these are snapshots. Snapshots of your applications. As you can see, already the system has taken three snapshots in response to the protection rule that we had created just a couple minutes ago. And these are now being seeded to Xi data centers. Of course this takes time for seeding, so what I have is a setup already and that's the production environment. I'll cut over to that. This is my production environment. Click "Explore," now you see the same application running in production and I have a few other VMs that are not protected. Let's go to "Recovery Points." It has been running for sometime, these recover points are there and they have been replicated to Xi. Speaker 2: So let's do the failover then. Speaker 1: Yeah, so to failover, you'll have to go to Xi so let me login to Xi. This time I'll use my production account for logging into Xi. I'm logging in. The first thing that you'll see in Xi is a dashboard that gives you a quick summary of what your DR testing has been so far, if there are any issues with the replication that you have and most importantly the monthly charges. So right now I've spent with my own credit card about close to 1,000 bucks. You'll have to refund it quickly. Speaker 2: It depends. If the- Speaker 1: If this works- Speaker 2: IF the demo works. Speaker 1: Yeah, if it works, okay. As you see, there are no VMs right now here. If I go to the recovery points, they are there. I can click on the recovery plan that I had created and let's see how hard it's going to be. I click "Failover." It says three entities that, based on the snapshots, it knows that it can recovery from source to destination, which is Xi. And one click for the failover. Now we'll see what happens. Speaker 2: So this is essentially failing over my production now. Speaker 1: Failing over your production now. [crosstalk 01:52:53] If you click on the "HR App Recovery," here you see now it started the recovery plan. The simple recovery plan that we had created, it actually gets converted to a series of tasks that the system has to do. Each VM has to be hydrated, powered on in the right order and so on and so forth. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can keep an eye on it. But in the meantime, let's talk about something else. We are doing failover, but after you failover, you run in Xi as if it was your own setup and environment. Maybe I want to create a new VM. I create a VM and I want to maybe extend my HR app's web tier. Let me name it as "HR_Web_3." It's going to boot from that disk. Production network, I want to run it on production network. We have production and test categories. This one, I want to give it employee payroll category. Now it applies the same policies as it's peers will. Here, I'm going to create the VM. As you can see, I can already see some VMs coming up. There you go. So three VMs from on-prem are now being filled over here while the fourth VM that I created is already being powered. Speaker 2: So this is basically realtime, one-click failover, while you're using Xi for your [inaudible 01:54:13] operations as well. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: Wow. Okay. Good stuff. What about- Speaker 1: Let me add here. As the other cloud vendors, they'll ask you to make your apps ready for their clouds. Well we tell our engineers is make our cloud ready for your apps. So as you can see, this failover is working. Speaker 2: So what about failback? Speaker 1: All of them are up and you can see the protection rule "platinum" has been applied to all four. Now let's look at this recovery plan points "HR_Web_3" right here, it's already there. Now assume the on-prem was already up. Let's go back to on-prem- Speaker 2: So now the scenario is, while Binny's coming up, is that the on-prem has come back up and we're going to do live migration back as in a failback scenario between the data centers. Speaker 1: And how hard is it going to be. "HR App Recovery" the same "HR App Recovery", I click failover and the system is smart enough to understand the direction is reversed. It's also smart enough to figure out "Hey, there are now the four VMs are there instead of three." Xi to on-prem, one-click failover again. Speaker 2: And it's rerunning obviously the same runbook but in- Speaker 1: Same runbook but the details are different. But it's hidden from the customer. Let me go to the VMs view and do something interesting here. I'll group them by availability zone. Here you go. As you can see, this is a hybrid cloud view. Same management plane for both sides public and private. There are two availability zones, the Xi availability zone is in the cloud- Speaker 2: So essentially you're moving from the top- Speaker 1: Yeah, top- Speaker 2: ... to the bottom. Speaker 1: ... to the bottom. Speaker 2: That's happening in the background. While this is happening, let me take the time to go and look at billing in Xi. Speaker 1: Sure, some of the common operations that you can now see in a hybrid view. Speaker 2: So you go to "Billing" here and first let me look at my account. And account is a simple page, I have set up active directory and you can add your own XML file, upload it. You can also add multi-factor authentication, all those things are simple. On the billing side, you can see more details about how did I rack up $966. Here's my credit card. Detailed description of where the cost is coming from. I can also download previous versions, builds. Speaker 1: It's actually Nutanix as a service essentially, right? Speaker 2: Yep. Speaker 1: As a subscription service. Speaker 2: Not only do we go to on-prem as you can see, while we were talking, two VMs have already come back on-prem. They are powered off right now. The other two are on the wire. Oh, there they are. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: So now four VMs are there. Speaker 1: Okay. Perfect. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but it's good. Speaker 2: It always works. Speaker 1: Always works. All right. Speaker 2: As you can see the platinum protection rule is now already applied to them and now it has reversed the direction of [inaudible 01:57:12]- Speaker 1: Remember, we showed one-click DR, failover, failback, built into the product when Xi ships to any Nutanix fabric. You can start with DSX on premise, obviously when you failover to Xi. You can start with AHV, things that are going to take the same paradigm of one-click operations into this hybrid view. Speaker 2: Let's stop doing lift and shift. The era has come for click and shift. Speaker 1: Binny's now been promoted to the Chief Marketing Officer, too by the way. Right? So, one more thing. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: You know we don't stop any conferences without a couple of things that are new. The first one is something that we should have done, I guess, a couple of years ago. Speaker 2: It depends how you look at it. Essentially, if you look at the cloud vendors, one of the key things they have done is they've built services as building blocks for the apps that run on top of them. What we have done at Nutanix, we've built core services like block services, file services, now with Calm, a marketplace. Now if you look at [inaudible 01:58:14] applications, one of the core building pieces is the object store. I'm happy to announce that we have the object store service coming up. Again, in true Nutanix fashion, it's going to be elastic. Speaker 1: Let's- Speaker 2: Let me show you. Speaker 1: Yeah, let's show it. It's something that is an object store service by the way that's not just for your primary, but for your secondary. It's obviously not just for on-prem, it's hybrid. So this is being built as a next gen object service, as an extension of the core fabric, but accommodating a bunch of these new paradigms. Speaker 2: Here is the object browser. I've created a bunch of buckets here. Again, object stores can be used in various ways: as primary object store, or for secondary use cases. I'll show you both. I'll show you a Hadoop use case where Hadoop is using this as a primary store and a backup use case. Let's just jump right in. This is a Hadoop bucket. AS you can see, there's a temp directory, there's nothing interesting there. Let me go to my Hadoop VM. There it is. And let me run a Hadoop job. So this Hadoop job essentially is going to create a bunch of files, write them out and after that do map radius on top. Let's wait for the job to start. It's running now. If we go back to the object store, refresh the page, now you see it's writing from benchmarks. Directory, there's a bunch of files that will write here over time. This is going to take time. Let's not wait for it, but essentially, it is showing Hadoop that uses AWS 3 compatible API, that can run with our object store because our object store exposes AWS 3 compatible APIs. The other use case is the HYCU backup. As you can see, that's a- Section 12 of 13 [01:50:00 - 02:00:04] Section 13 of 13 [02:00:00 - 02:13:42] (NOTE: speaker names may be different in each section) Vineet: This is the hycu back up ... As you can see, that's a back-up software that can back-up WSS3. If you point it to Nutanix objects or it can back-up there as well. There are a bunch of back-up files in there. Now, object stores, it's very important for us to be able to view what's going on there and make sure there's no objects sprawled because once it's easy to write objects, you just accumulate a lot of them. So what we wanted to do, in true Nutanix style, is give you a quick overview of what's happening with your object store. So here, as you can see, you can look at the buckets, where the load is, you can look at the bucket sizes, where the data is, and also what kind of data is there. Now this is a dashboard that you can optimize, and customize, for yourself as well, right? So that's the object store. Then we go back here, and I have one more thing for you as well. Speaker 2: Okay. Sounds good. I already clicked through a slide, by the way, by mistake, but keep going. Vineet: That's okay. That's okay. It is actually a quiz, so it's good for people- Speaker 2: Okay. Sounds good. Vineet: It's good for people to have some clues. So the quiz is, how big is my SAP HANA VM, right? I have to show it to you before you can answer so you don't leak the question. Okay. So here it is. So the SAP HANA VM here vCPU is 96. Pretty beefy. Memory is 1.5 terabytes. The question to all of you is, what's different in this screen? Speaker 2: Who's a real Prism user here, by the way? Come on, it's got to be at least a few. Those guys. Let's see if they'll notice something. Vineet: What's different here? Speaker 3: There's zero CVM. Vineet: Zero CVM. Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Vineet: So, essentially, in the Nutanix fabric, every server has to run a [inaudible 02:01:48] machine, right? That's where the storage comes from. I am happy to announce the Acropolis Compute Cloud, where you will be able to run the HV on servers that are storage-less, and add it to your existing cluster. So it's a compute cloud that now can be managed from Prism Central, and that way you can preserve your investments on your existing server farms, and add them to the Nutanix fabric. Speaker 2: Gotcha. So, essentially ... I mean, essentially, imagine, now that you have the equivalent of S3 and EC2 for the enterprise now on Premisis, like you have the equivalent compute and storage services on JCP and AWS, and so forth, right? So the full flexibility for any kind of workload is now surely being available on the same Nutanix fabric. Thanks a lot, Vineet. Before we wrap up, I'd sort of like to bring this home. We've announced a pretty strategic partnership with someone that has always inspired us for many years. In fact, one would argue that the genesis of Nutanix actually was inspired by Google and to talk more about what we're actually doing here because we've spent a lot of time now in the last few months to really get into the product capabilities. You're going to see some upcoming capabilities and 55X release time frame. To talk more about that stuff as well as some of the long-term synergies, let me invite Bill onstage. C'mon up Bill. Tell us a little bit about Google's view in the cloud. Bill: First of all, I want to compliment the demo people and what you did. Phenomenal work that you're doing to make very complex things look really simple. I actually started several years ago as a product manager in high availability and disaster recovery and I remember, as a product manager, my engineers coming to me and saying "we have a shortage of our engineers and we want you to write the fail-over routines for the SAP instance that we're supporting." And so here's the PERL handbook, you know, I haven't written in PERL yet, go and do all that work to include all the network setup and all that work, that's amazing, what you are doing right there and I think that's the spirit of the partnership that we have. From a Google perspective, obviously what we believe is that it's time now to harness the power of scale security and these innovations that are coming out. At Google we've spent a lot of time in trying to solve these really large problems at scale and a lot of the technology that's been inserted into the industry right now. Things like MapReduce, things like TenserFlow algorithms for AI and things like Kubernetes and Docker were first invented at Google to solve problems because we had to do it to be able to support the business we have. You think about search, alright? When you type in search terms within the search box, you see a white screen, what I see is all the data-center work that's happening behind that and the MapReduction to be able to give you a search result back in seconds. Think about that work, think about that process. Taking and pursing those search terms, dividing that over thousands of [inaudible 02:05:01], being able to then search segments of the index of the internet and to be able to intelligent reduce that to be able to get you an answer within seconds that is prioritized, that is sorted. How many of you, out there, have to go to page two and page three to get the results you want, today? You don't because of the power of that technology. We think it's time to bring that to the consumer of the data center enterprise space and that's what we're doing at Google. Speaker 2: Gotcha, man. So I know we've done a lot of things now over the last year worth of collaboration. Why don't we spend a few minutes talking through a couple things that we're started on, starting with [inaudible 02:05:36] going into com and then we'll talk a little bit about XI. Bill: I think one of the advantages here, as we start to move up the stack and virtualize things to your point, right, is virtual machines and the work required of that still takes a fair amount of effort of which you're doing a lot to reduce, right, you're making that a lot simpler and seamless across both On-Prem and the cloud. The next step in the journey is to really leverage the power of containers. Lightweight objects that allow you to be able to head and surface functionality without being dependent upon the operating system or the VM to be able to do that work. And then having the orchestration layer to be able to run that in the context of cloud and On-Prem We've been very successful in building out the Kubernetes and Docker infrastructure for everyone to use. The challenge that you're solving is how to we actually bridge the gap. How do we actually make that work seamlessly between the On-Premise world and the cloud and that's where our partnership, I think, is so valuable. It's cuz you're bringing the secret sauce to be able to make that happen. Speaker 2: Gotcha, gotcha. One last thing. We talked about Xi and the two companies are working really closely where, essentially the Nutanix fabric can seamlessly seep into every Google platform as infrastructure worldwide. Xi, as a service, could be delivered natively with GCP, leading to some additional benefits, right? Bill: Absolutely. I think, first and foremost, the infrastructure we're building at scale opens up all sorts of possibilities. I'll just use, maybe, two examples. The first one is network. If you think about building out a global network, there's a lot of effort to do that. Google is doing that as a byproduct of serving our consumers. So, if you think about YouTube, if you think about there's approximately a billion hours of YouTube that's watched every single day. If you think about search, we have approximately two trillion searches done in a year and if you think about the number of containers that we run in a given week, we run about two billion containers per week. So the advantage of being able to move these workloads through Xi in a disaster recovery scenario first is that you get to take advantage of the scale. Secondly, it's because of the network that we've built out, we had to push the network out to the edge. So every single one of our consumers are using YouTube and search and Google Play and all those services, by the way we have over eight services today that have more than a billion simultaneous users, you get to take advantage of that network capacity and capability just by moving to the cloud. And then the last piece, which is a real advantage, we believe, is that it's not just about the workloads you're moving but it's about getting access to new services that cloud preventers, like Google, provide. For example, are you taking advantage like the next generation Hadoop, which is our big query capability? Are you taking advantage of the artificial intelligence derivative APIs that we have around, the video API, the image API, the speech-to-text API, mapping technology, all those additional capabilities are now exposed to you in the availability of Google cloud that you can now leverage directly from systems that are failing over and systems that running in our combined environment. Speaker 2: A true converged fabric across public and private. Bill: Absolutely. Speaker 2: Great stuff Bill. Thank you, sir. Bill: Thank you, appreciate it. Speaker 2: Good to have you. So, the last few slides. You know we've talked about, obviously One OS, One Click and eCloud. At the end of the day, it's pretty obvious that we're evaluating the move from a form factor perspective, where it's not just an OS across multiple platforms but it's also being distributed genuinely from consuming itself as an appliance to a software form factor, to subscription form factor. What you saw today, obviously, is the fact that, look you know we're still continuing, the velocity has not slowed down. In fact, in some cases it's accelerated. If you ask my quality guys, if you ask some of our customers, we're coming out fast and furious with a lot of these capabilities. And some of this directly reflects, not just in features, but also in performance, just like a public cloud, where our performance curve is going up while our price-performance curve is being more attractive over a period of time. And this is balancing it with quality, it is what differentiates great companies from good companies, right? So when you look at the number of nodes that have been shipping, it was around ten more nodes than where we were a few years ago. But, if you look at the number of customer-found defects, as a percentage of number of nodes shipped it is not only stabilized, it has actually been coming down. And that's directly reflected in the NPS part. That most of you guys love. How many of you guys love your Customer Support engineers? Give them a round of applause. Great support. So this balance of velocity, plus quality, is what differentiates a company. And, before we call it a wrap, I just want to leave you with one thing. You know, obviously, we've talked a lot about technology, innovation, inspiration, and so forth. But, as I mentioned, from last night's discussion with Sir Ranulph, let's think about a few things tonight. Don't take technology too seriously. I'll give you a simple story that he shared with me, that puts things into perspective. The year was 1971. He had come back from Aman, from his service. He was figuring out what to do. This was before he became a world-class explorer. 1971, he had a job interview, came down from Scotland and applied for a role in a movie. And he failed that job interview. But he was selected from thousands of applicants, came down to a short list, he was a ... that's a hint ... he was a good looking guy and he lost out that role. And the reason why I say this is, if he had gotten that job, first of all I wouldn't have met him, but most importantly the world wouldn't have had an explorer like him. The guy that he lost out to was Roger Moore and the role was for James Bond. And so, when you go out tonight, enjoy with your friends [inaudible 02:12:06] or otherwise, try to take life a little bit once upon a time or more than once upon a time. Have fun guys, thank you. Speaker 5: Ladies and gentlemen please make your way to the coffee break, your breakout sessions will begin shortly. Don't forget about the women's lunch today, everyone is welcome. Please join us. You can find the details in the mobile app. Please share your feedback on all sessions in the mobile app. There will be prizes. We will see you back here and 5:30, doors will open at 5, after your last breakout session. Breakout sessions will start sharply at 11:10. Thank you and have a great day. Section 13 of 13 [02:00:00 - 02:13:42]

[Announcer] - Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back in D.C., welcome to NextConf, this is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Dheeraj Pandey is here, he's the chairman and CEO of Nutanix. Long time CUBE alum. Great to see you again. >> Pleasure. >> So you know, I love your style, up on stage yesterday. Very philosophical, always have been humble. You sort of said, "I'm going to stay humble," and it appears that's the case. But yet, there's so much excitement around here, you have a lot to be very proud of. How do you feel? >> You know, there's no finish line in this company building, just like there's no finish line when you have a family, it never ends actually. Nutanix is a family, and we are trying to make it a bigger, happier family with more customers, more partners, more employees. I feel good, but I think this company is good right now, it's not a great company. We probably will have to spend another decade to make it a great company actually, so. >> How do you, as the chairman and CEO, how do you define "great company"? >> Great companies, for one, actually take really good care of their stakeholders. You think about employees and customers and partners and also Wall Street, so I think at the end of the day we have barely begun the journey in some of these things. Customers, sure, we have quite a few of them, but I think we can do so much more for them. At some level, even in the largest accounts, we're barely scratching the surface actually. Same thing with employees, you know, we have almost 3000 employees but still, we could do so much more for them as well in terms of wealth creation, in terms of building careers. Very early days. Same thing with Wall Street as well, very early days actually. >> Dheeraj, you're always opening to listening to feedback, but you mentioned, you've now got a lot of constituencies. I know I've interviewed you and said well you know, there's the 90-day shock clock but, we can't get distracted, we need to focus. How do you, you know, what is the filter, how do you, what do you take in and internalize to translate into the direction of the company? >> You know I talk about two things. There's delight, there's waste. Delight for main street and make sure you're cognizant of the waste with Wall Street, because if you keep growing they won't bother you. What they bother you with is waste. How are you growing, what does efficiency look like at scale? So I just learn "growth at any cost". I think these are all timely reminders for any company, so that it doesn't get too painful when recessions hit you, because there's highs and lows of any company that you have to go through. So I believe that waste is the larger ego of delight, and if you can do a really good job of delighting our customers, our partners, our employees and then figure out how to deal with all of this with waste in mind, I think we'll do a pretty good job. So what matters the most is delight, but not without figuring out what's waste-like. I think you have to keep looking at these "KPIs" and say how are we really doing at scale with respect to distribution, marketing, product development, product engineering. Now we have a pretty large engineering workforce as well. How can the company be delightful for them if you don't have "two-pizza teams", if you don't have APIs and microservices in which they actually talk to each other, still feel like they're the CTO of their company, because they all want to make independent decisions and design trade-offs and things of that nature. I think we talk about this thing which is a really important abstract thing, it's called the paradox of growth. I learned this from some of these folks who have done this book called The Founder's Mentality. Growth creates complexity and complexity kills growth, so just be aware of what you really vied for can kill you as well, and continue to release complexity to organizations in the way you deal with your customers, and I think those are the things that really matter. I look at employees as customers, I look at customers as customers, I look at partners as customers. If you have the customer-centric view, you'll probably continue to simplify things under the cover. >> One of the things that you see in great companies is early on they're able to articulate a vision, see that vision, execute on it obviously and continue to grow their team, I mean that's a big part of your job. You've dramatically, well first of all, the team that you started with was quite large. Cloud expands that enormously. So maybe talk about your vision and how you're seeing that through. >> Well I think from very early on, the mission was invisible infrastructure. And that is an infinite mission because again, no finish line actually. You can make things invisible and then probably say we still aren't invisible enough and you have to make it more invisible. When you have downer to four clicks you have to say how about three and two and one click? And finally get rid of the click because machine learning can come in and automate more things as well. So how more and more things go from humans to machines and how the human-man-machine interface becomes less frictioned is the vision of this company. Now, all of this is not just graphical UI because the systems have to work, they have to be scalable, stable, reliable, available. So the back-end has to be very robust but then without a front-end it's really the same as a man-machine interface. Also the machine-machine interface, because APIs match for a lot as well, you know. If you're only thinking about man-machine, then you've lost a lot of this automation and machine learning capability as well, actually. >> I think back to some of our earliest conversations, you always talked about Nutanix is a software company and the challenge of our day is building distributed systems. The tooling and the way we build things today are very different from when you started the company. If you were starting from a bare sheet today, would you be born in the cloud, you know, how would things like containers and microservices change the way, or, and how are you taking from where you are today, which it started out in virtualization, is that a core, you've got AHV driving a lot of the pieces, versus some of those who are models? >> Yeah, I mean, look, VMware was building an operating system, but they needed a shield of EMC to go sell and distribute that. We had the compute virtualization piece that came a little bit later, but the storage virtualization, the control plane pieces, we needed to shield them, and we shield them in appliance, and that became our form factor the could give us the control of our own destiny, and that's what the appliance did to us. But you always knew you were building software, actually. And many people told us early on, just don't build appliances at all, and we would've been killed, we probably would have to sell this company early on, because it's really hard to build an OS company early on when you don't have a brand and nobody's willing to support you and customers are like, you know, if nobody else is willing to support you, how do you really build an operating system, actually? So I think if there's a method to the madness, we always knew we had to be hardware-agnostic, that's why we never built NVRAMs and FBGAs and things like that. And over time when Dell came forward and said look, you should OEM your product, I think it was a very natural decision for us two and a half, three years ago. I think there's been this controlled release of goodness of this operating system that basically not mean like oh we never thought about it, we always thought about hardware-agnosticism, hypervisor-agnosticism, all those things were there from day one in this company. But you know the question of whether we would start in the cloud today? Honestly, all companies have to start where they are in order to make money, and continue to navigate the shifting sands of time actually. I mean, you sell books, then realize it's not good enough, you go and sell, you know goods with e-commerce, and that's not good enough, you sell computing. We started an office productivity company, go and do a desktop operating system, then you go and do databases and server operating system and then all sorts of things for the family room and so on and then finally do a cloud. I think there's no, you know, change is the only constant you know, if you were to think about it, and companies that actually survive and thrive, they start someplace, and their thing, every three, four years, you just find the adjacencies, and keep navigating, you know, how the market is actually shifting and changing. >> There's a strange aura around your company. Now maybe it's the allure of the product, I don't know, but you have a lot of companies now coming into this ecosystem. We have Chad on next from Dell EMC, you know, arguably one of your larger competitors, okay, but they're here and they're happy to be here. So, it's, I say, maybe it's product, but it's also part cultural. And I'm guessing that your philosophy is it can't be a zero sum game. It's got to be a win-win for the partner, so I wonder if you could add any color to that. >> Yeah, that's a great point by the way, bring up this idea that you can be all things to all people. Somebody asked me in this analyst meetup, how about just go and build a firewall? We can, there's too deep a space in there for us to go build everything, so we need to have open APIs, where others also make money. And by the way, when you have a really flourishing ecosystem, the word of mouth, that they're also making money, the word builds a larger ecosystem, a larger operating system and so on. That's what Apple 2.0 was, because in 1.0 they were all about it's me, it's mine, no one else can do anything, and then they saw Microsoft, and how it was really building this burgeoning ecosystem with APIs, APIs, and more APIs. 90 was Microsoft's decade because of APIs actually, and partners and ecosystems, and Apple learned from them by the way, so when they came out and said we built a device, they said no no no, we've also got to build iTunes, because that's ecosystem, and then they built iCloud and app store and things like that. So I think there are lessons galore in the last 20, 25 years where if you're not a good API-driven company, you're probably not a long-lasting company actually. And the idea of a platform is incomplete without those APIs and the ecosystem itself. >> There's a change in accountant coming which is going to make you, I guess, to restate the software that you've sold through the OEMs will probably have Wall Street look at you a little bit differently. We've talked in the past before about how much you want to sell as Nutanix, how much you want to sell with partners. What's that mix that you see today going forward? How much of your product will you see, hardware, software, services, what's a good mix for you? >> Yeah, I think it's a, it's a good opportunity for the company to really think about revenue 2.0, because revenue 1.0 was what we had sort of planned out four, five years ago and 2.0 is a time when we have different form factors. We have ELAs that we started doing in the last 12 months. We're selling software in CISCO and now software in HP. Obviously Zai will happen in subscription as well. Now we have markable routes to market, you know, obviously the OEMs have actually matured, both OEMs have matured. So the question is of how do we really make it simple one more time? Because obviously there's more routes to market, so as a company we're saying now we can sell more software, and with a new accounting change, which is called ASC 606, software will have to be recognized in the same quarter, we can't defer it arbitrarily. And in some ways it's a good thing, in some ways it's bad because it takes away our goodness of the waterfall, because we could have deferred more revenue, as a company we've deferred a lot, I mean, folks know we have about $465,000,000 of deferred revenue right now, because of how good we were in actually postponing this instant gratification of cutted quarter and so on. So I think some of that will have to be brought into the current quarter but in some sense it's a good thing because we can then take the gross margin of that software and sell more appliances, so I think there's some mixing that'll happen with different margin profiles that'll have to come and kind of work with each other to say can we still grow as a company beyond a billion. >> But these are income statement gymnastics, not that you're playing, but that you're able to- >> Well, there's something about guard rails of the gross margin, because Amazon, what did Amazon say, look, your gross margin, my opportunity, right? So if you just let unbridled software go and sell itself, then our gross margins will be starting to creep up, but what if you kept it within the guard rails of around 60%, and then went and sold more appliances, because the software gave us the luxury to buy growth? I think those are the kind of architectures we are actually looking at right now. >> And the knobs that you might choose to turn, but it will have an impact on the income statement from an operating profit standpoint, I mean, right? If you're going to recognize all that deferred revenue up front you know- >> Just in subscription, we can actually do one-year terms and things like that, but obviously we don't want to completely throw the baby out of the bathwater, because a lot of subscription is a good thing, and Zai will provide subscription. Hopefully as we do this Cisco and HP on software, we can do one-year terms. >> It doesn't seem like these are distractions to you, I mean, Michael Dell always talks about the 90-day shock clock. With you, you sat down with Stu after the IPO, I was struck by your comments of "look, I'm not going to get all wound up about the stock price", you know, you're not going to obsess over it. Now it's easy not to obsess when you're growing at 60, 65% a year, but it doesn't seem like it's been a big distraction for you. >> Yeah, I think it's, just like a growing customer base can be a distraction, can be a strength, you know, because you could say, well, they're asking me not to innovate at all, and have the brute force figure out a way to have velocity and quality, because existing customers want quality, because they don't know what else you can be, like, give me a faster horse, right? And then you know from within the area we innovate that's where velocity matters. Same thing is true for Wall Street as well. Main Street wants both, Wall Street is saying look, as long as you can keep growing and grow wisely, I'm not going to touch you, actually. >> I want to ask you about your customers. We've had some great customers on. Most of the customers I've talked to that are Nutanix are what I'd call, you know, they're in the early part of the adoption, they're people that, they're taking some risks, we heard NASDAQ talk you know, forget about the fear, you've got to go forward. As you grow, how do you stop, you know, the enterprise buyer from trying to shift you, change your model? I loved that you're doing things like, you know, many companies are trying to switch to, you know, consumption models to pay as you grow, but as you try to grow that customer base, how do you pull them ahead or how do they not, you know, hold you back? >> Well I think as long as we have an authentic product, customer service, sales motion relationship they'll like us. And I think obviously there are different kind of sub-functions in the customer itself like procurement versus ID versus the business user and so on, and it's a constant hussle, there's no, again way to say that it's going to be a perfect world one day. If you can keep building great products, have great customer service, and we know that our sales motion is easy because it can, it can be a really good product and have really good customer support, but customers might hate transacting with you. I think that's the last piece that matters, and I think as computing becomes a real consumer market, that's what's happening you know with cloud, you can go and buy a computer like the way you used to buy your toothpaste or mouthwash or shampoo. I think it's becoming even more customer-centric, even more customer service-focused and so on. So I think the changing landscape of computing keeps a lot of vendors honest actually. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody will innovate, enough of them will say look, I'm done, and I think one of the things we've done well in the last five years is that the thesis of the product market fit. Like well, we know this is the product direction, this is the vision of the company, it has actually stuck. You know, people have said "I like what you guys are saying," actually. Over and over and over again, I mean, combos and acquisition, people are like "I love this". HP was one of those really audacious ideas, people said "I love this, now that I see it, I love it, when I didn't see it, I was skeptical". So I think a lot of the thesis of the company around innovation have worked in our favor. I think if we keep having that luck with ourselves, good things will happen. >> So Dheeraj, your positioning of the company has usually been a little bit ahead of the market, you know, for years it was like, ah, what, that HEI thing is a niche, and it's not really much that different, oh, enterprise cloud is nothing more than, you know, kind of vapor you know, what are the misperceptions you see today that you'd want to clarify for the market as to who Nutanix is today and where you're going? >> Well the first one is that we are a hardware company, because we are a hardware company, even though we sell a lot of software within the hardware and obviously we do a lot more software these days. And the fact that HEI's the destination, where HEIs basically was a mere milestone like five years ago or something, you know, we talk about I'd say about five years ago imagine a lot of the competition is talking about SEI today, when people are saying the compute storage form factor is interesting but not that interesting because I need to figure out how to converge clouds now, not just converge devices within my data center, I need to figure out OPEX and CAPEX, how do I meld those things, how do I burst, and things like that, you know. So the story keeps evolving because the consumers, the customers, and the competitors continue to evolve the market as well actually. So I would say that people have to look at us as an OS company, and the more they try us the more they realize why we are an OS company. They look at our networking R&D, they look at our security pieces together, storage, hypervisor, and now Zai, I think, you know, good things will happen. >> I inferred from your keynote yesterday that you're on a mission to change the operating model. Certainly Amazon has changed the operating model as we well know and it's translated into their operating profit, you know, their marginal economics as we've talked about in the past are compelling, software-like for services. As you change that operate- first of all, did I get that right? Are you on that- >> I call it a consumption model. >> Consumption model, great. So where do you see that going for customers? They're obviously taking labor costs out, how far can they take that- how much can you sort of automate in that process for your own company, taking those labor costs out to drive your margin? >> I think again, now going back to this idea of invisible infrastructure, just like it has no finish line, automation has no finish line. We used to automate 50 years ago as well. Automation as a word has existed for 200 years you know, since the industrial revolution actually. So again, there's no finish line in automation, there's no finish line for what machines can do compared to humans and I think they've constantly evolved, I mean, 200 years ago we were primarily agrarian, we would do agriculture and nothing more, and today we are doing a lot more things with our brain and I think we're becoming a more evolved species actually. So I think as machines do more, humans will also figure out a way to continue to do higher level things, so I think the best part about this company is that what we have chosen has no end to it, and the more we think we automate, the more we'll have to automate some more actually. And not just within the realm of compute, virtualization, or storage or networking or security, but also migration, portability, you know, what does it mean to really look at things on and off premise and things like that, so a lot of work is around that. Application automation is a big part of it as well. >> When I hear you say there's no finish line, it reminds me of Jeff Bezos, he says, "there is no day two, we will always be in day one". The two concerns I have, that is, number one, you can't have your employees constantly be charging, you know they run to the point where they're going to burn out and I hear Amazon is a challenging company to work for. Secondly, every customer I talk to, like, boy, they can't keep up with the six week release cycles that are coming at that, you know, remember when it used to be 18 to 24 months, you know, that was nice, we could do upgrade cycles when we want. How do you internally and with customers manage that pace of change and avoid burnout or over-complicating the environment for your customers? >> That's a great point actually, because obviously, if you don't have delighted work, it's hard. For them right now their delight, for Amazon employees, it's stock pricing. That's the only delight they have. But I look at it as a marathon of strengths. You basically have to sprint, take some rest, like after this we'll rest a little, and then say let's go and do another sprint, because NIS is another sprint, you know, and then reading all this stuff is another sprint, so I think if we can keep looking at that, and plus even do a little bit of baton-passing that'll happen, you know, I think as a company, we were all in San Jose and now some of the baton has passed to Seattle, some of the baton has passed to RDP Durham and Bangalore. We build this distributed workforce where different teams are coming in and saying "now I can run with it as well", like Bangalore could not have run with this six, seven, eight years ago, because everything was here. You know, RDP and Seattle were too small for us so I think there's critical mass emerging where the overall morale of the workforce is actually just as good as it was like five, six, seven years ago. Now, people talk about burnout a lot, but I also believe that a lot of this is choice. People who are saying "I know how to blend work and life". It's becoming hybrid, there's no such thing as work separate, life separate, it's melding into each other right now, and it's really becoming like this where people who are working smarter saying "I can figure out what that means in terms of balance". And millenials are again one of those who were born with all these things from day one. So the devices have been with them from day one, actually. They're saying "well, I can't not interact with the machine some time or the other". So I think that a lot of this is evolution for us, I mean, the eight to five way of looking at work, which is "batch processing", is now becoming multitasking and so on, so what happened to operating systems 30, 40 years ago is what's happening to humans as well actually. >> You know, we're out of time, but I wanted to share with our audience, one of the unique things about this conference is that you have advisors. A lot of people hire McKinsey and it all stays, you know, behind closed doors. Condi Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, Deepak Malhotra, these are advisors to your company and we've met them all, many have been on theCUBE. You share with your community, your advisors, and you put them in front of your community and it's great content. I've really not seen a company be that transparent with its advisors before. Deliberate? Just sort of happens? >> It's always been like that actually, you know because the more a company learns from them, honestly, the more we've gotten out of them in turns of ROI, if you just think of it from a left wing point of view, but the right wing is that people want to build careers, not just wealth, they want to build careers, they want to actually be with folks that they can look up to you know, when the going gets tough. How do you remember somebody's words? Not just in books, but you know, in flesh and blood, you're like, wow, I talked to Condi Rice, I talked to Bob Gates, I talked to Steve Hadley, these people told me exactly what they went through, and I think there's no substitute to experience actually. To me, people like Mark Templeton and Frank Slootman, they all are great sources of energy and aspiration and ambition as well. >> Outstanding. >> No compression I've heard on experience, right Dave? >> That's right. Dheeraj, I feel calm just hanging out with you here, so thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure to see you, and thanks for having us. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from .Next, be right back. (electronic music)