>>Yeah. >>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to IBM. Think Digital 2020. This is the Cube, and we're really excited to have two great guests on Michael Jordan is the distinguished engineer with IBM Z Security. Michael, good to see you again. Welcome back. >>Thank you. It's good to be back. >>And, Matt, what Born is the program director and offering lead for Z 15. Good to see that. >>Thank you for having me, >>guys. Easy. Easy is a good place to be. Great corner, 61% growth. You got to love it. Regulations. It'll be feeling pretty good. I mean, other than what we're going through. But from a business standpoint, Z powered through, didn't it? >>It did. I mean, we're really pleased with the contribution that Z continues to make for our clients. Especially right now, given everything that's going on, business continuity, scale, resilient security. They're just so important for our clients in the platform. >>Yes. So we're gonna We're gonna talk a lot about this. Maybe Matt could start with you just in terms of, you know, you talk about. Ah, cyber resiliency. Hear that a lot? Um, e I think it may be. Means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. What does it mean? Busy? >>Yeah, for us. I mean, you know, we kind of start in many ways with, like that, this definition on that which talks about the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover, adapt all of these adverse conditions, might face or stresses compromises in attacks in your systems and your just cyber results. It's so it's a really important top of mind talking point from other clients who are thinking about this both from, I guess, the resilience when it comes to the systems and also the data as well. From our standpoint, you know, Z has been at the forefront of resilience for many, many generations. Now, whether that's the scale that systems we're able to provide, the ability to tap into more capacity is needed, whether on a temporary or permanent basis, cause you never know when a when a spike might be occurring on day, especially with clients going through digital transformation as well. The fact that we can talk about solutions being designed for seven nines of availability on. But the reason why clients like Tesco or alliances for their resilient banking platform or Department of Treasury in Puerto Rico depend on us or for a highly available solution. So it's never been more important for by us. >>So, Michael, from a technical standpoint, um, I mean, I go back to the rack f days and and I I used to ask, why is it that, you know, the mainframe had, you know, such good security, and it was explained to me years ago? Well, cause you knew everything that went on who touched what? You know, there was a clear understanding of that clear visibility of that. Um, but maybe you could explain just for laypeople from just from a technical standpoint. Why is it that Z has such strong cyber resiliency? >>Sure. So So some of it, I think, is there's 22 aspects that I want to mention first is, you know, culture, right? You know, the IBM Z, you know, development team and broader, you know, design team. We have in our culture to build systems that are secure and robust, that that's kind of part of our DNA. And so it's that mindset when you look at, you know, technologies like parallel system, flex and geographic geographically dispersed, parallel, parallel suspects, GPS. You know, those are ingrained in those technologies, but the other capability that we have or I should say, um, you know, benefit that we we have is we own the whole stack, right? We own, you know, the hardware we own the firmware, um, and we own the software that sits on top of there in the middle, where and so whether it's resiliency or whether it's security when we want to design and build solutions, you know, to make optimal solutions, you know any of those spaces we can actually design and architect the solutions, you know, both at the right point in the stack and across the stack as needed to really deliver on these capabilities. >>So, Matt, one of our partners, ET are holds these CEO roundtables, and one of the CEO said we really weren't ready from a resiliency standpoint. We're too focused on on er and kind of missed the boat on business continuity to narrow focus. I presume you're hearing a lot of that these days. I wonder if you could just tell us about some of the things that you're seeing with clients, Maybe the conversations you're having and how you're helping Sort of broaden that capability. >>Yeah, sure. I mean, to your point. I mean, nobody really could have quite predicted. You know what we're dealing with right now, but, you know, we have had over many generations of the Z platform, you know, clients deeply partnered with us to try and make sure they have a a highly available environment for business continuity. And, you know, just thinking about things from a Dell perspective. You know what they can do to fortify and make their solution sort of more resilient on the day by day basis. I mean, one of the things you might be talking about, some of the inherent capabilities we have a hassle. The fact that we build, you know, our systems with the additional capacity kind of baked in. Which means that for so many of our clients, you know, in the first in the first quarter, where they were seeing the huge amounts of peak workload kind of coming in, that they needed to be able to deal with the fact that we design our systems to be able to just kind of gobble up that work. With that we call dark capacity to be turned on at the drop of a hat. It's tremendously important because not only need to be offsite, just resilient in terms of the applications, but you need to get a deal with growth. You're going through that. The other aspect, which is a new capability with the 15 that kind of builds on what we could do with that dark past thing is this concept of instant recovery. But what we're actually helping clients do there in terms of fortifying and making their environment more resilient, is letting them attack into that dark capacity when they're going through restart activities of partitions, not just thinking about unplanned scenarios, but actually planned out just as well. So what that really helps with is because you always have to do planned maintenance. You know, when your systems, you know when you're partitions your your system because the environment. So what we're doing is saying when you're going through that restart sort of process, whether it's the shutdown, whether it's to bring up of the partition or the middleware or even in fact, actually helping you catch up. Kind of for what? You what you lost one weren't sort of processing workflow. We turn on that extra capacity in the system automatically for this boost window that were that we're helping our clients with. Not only we do that. Mike's point about owning a stack means that we can deliver that in a way that there's no increase in IBM software cost a reliever. So we're always kind of looking about what we can do to kind of move the ball forward to make a client's environment even more resilient as well. >>I've always, I learned from my mainframe days many, many years ago. And what when a vendor comes in and shows a new product, they always ask you what happens when something goes wrong? It's all about recovery that's always been one of the main frame strength. Mike, I want to ask you about data protection. I mean, it's a topic that again means a lot of things to a lot of people you know doesn't mean backup. There's data privacy. There's data Providence. There's data sovereignty. We talk about data protection from a Z prism. >>Sure, so So our point of view on data protection is is we view it as a as a multi layered proposition. It's not. It's not just one thing. In effect, we viewed the lens of a broader, you know, layered cybersecurity strategy where you know, data protection. And, you know, in this case, you know, talking about encryption and being another encrypt data on a massive scale is the foundation for, you know, a layered cyber security strategy, um, and providing capabilities for appliance. Do you protect data at the disk level with the 15? We also introduced the ability of actually being able to protect the data as it flows through their storage area network through something we call fibre channel endpoint security and then layering on top of that, you know, host based encryption capabilities, you know, in the operating system, whether it's, you know, buy or or data set level encryption and you know, then on top of that, they can layer additional capabilities for things like multi factor authentication to protect your privileged identities from being compromised or being able to do damage to your system and then, you know, building and layering. On top of that things like security, intelligence and being able to monitor and understand You know what, what's happening across the system. >>So I was talking with Developer the other day in cloud app pretty, you know, non mission critical. But ask them to use encryption and he said, Yeah, we could, but we don't cause it slows us down a little bit. So I'm wondering how you deal with that trade off performance versus Protection Z. How does he deal with that? >>Sure, So that's that. That's a great That's a great question. And that actually goes back to you know what we did with with our Z 14 so that the generation before and I think we've we've improved that with with the 15 and then I'll get to that in a bit. But one of the barriers that we recognized is exactly what you said is the You know, the cost of doing encryption is prohibitive, Um, and what we did is we have, ah, a cryptographic accelerator that's integrated into our micro processor that's capable of encrypting so each or it's capable of encrypting up to 14 gigabytes of data per second. And if you multiply that by the number of cores that you have. You know, a fully configured you nosy 15 met. What does it have any cores? Do we have in that 100 >>90 with >>190 So So do the math right? 190 times, you know, 14 gigabytes per second. It's an encryption powerhouse, and that can all be done synchronously with extremely low latency. So we have the horsepower to do encryption on a very broad scale with very, very low overhead. And that's what our clients are leveraging and taking advantage of. And with the Zy 15. That being we announced it and made available last year. We actually have now compression that's built into the micro processor so you can actually compress the data, Um, first and then encrypted. And there's a twofold benefits that first is now. I have less data to encrypt, so I have lowered my encryption overhead, and at the same time I've managed to preserve my storage efficiency. So it's a It's a twofold benefit there, >>you know. People talk off about Z, they talk about it, it's open. It's kind of all started back when you guys brought in Lennox. And now, of course, it's It's much more than that. Um, but I'm wondering how open plays into this notion of cyber resiliency in some respects there. Counter poised. But But how do you sort of square that circle for me? >>Yeah, I mean, it's kind of look at it is when it comes to openness and digital transformation, it's kind of doing it without compromise on. That's kind of the way I look at the Z platform because you're right. I mean the fact that we have the likes of open shift support on the seat platform or you can use, you know, answerable for for doing automation. I mean, were always looking to try and make sure that we support from A from a management standpoint or development standpoint. We'll use whichever tool frameworks languages are appropriate on the platform and integrated to a hyper cloud wherever you want to go. That's why when we look at it from the perspective of what it really means to have mission critical applications and why, it's why that is the key point about banks. Insurance companies, etcetera continue to trust. Z is there is the home for their system of record because they want to get the benefits. You know, the best of both worlds. So they want to be able to have the security, the resilience and the scale of the platform. But the same time they want to have flexibility to be able to use cloud native technologies to be able to deploy them on our platform. And then this micro sort of talking about the exciting thing for us is even going one step further. That says, if you do want your data to move around your hybrid cloud for very good reasons for certain scenarios, being able to have that capability to protect the data, not just encrypted that manage the privacy over the data as it flows out and see to kind of take those characteristics into the hybrid cloud is something that a lot of that clients been really, really excited to take advantage of it. It's >>about this conference. You might get certain >>charting Matt into a security guide. You see that? >>Yeah, >>I think everybody's got to be a security person these days. I want to ask about zero trust. You know, that term is thrown around a lot of, uh, you know, you can get kind of buzz, wordy. You see, people always have substance. I want to ask you guys what zero trust means the Io. >>So So I think there's, you know, my view of zeros where we're at from an industry from from zero. Trust is is very similar to where we're at with cloud, you know, going back a handful of years where if you ask 10 different people what you know, cloud was you get 10 different answers. Um, and none of them were probably wrong. And so I think, you know, we're very similar state in terms of our understanding and, you know, market maturity around zero trust. But there's, you know, at its for, you know, the the the The idea is, you know, we've been focused on protecting, you know, our environments using a castle and moat of approach. Um, and, you know, you know, protecting the perimeter. Yeah, and then trusting everything inside of inside of that. You know that that mode, if you will, um and what the zero trust is a recognition that that's not sufficient. And, you know, and then if you look at that in the context of our evolving and changing in environment and moving to hybrid multi clouds where, um, the notion of a perimeter is gone. You know that that strategy and approach for protection, it doesn't hold up. And so we need to evolve that, um And we need to have, you know, you know, move from the notion of, um, operational trust to a notion of technical trust and building, you know, building more sophisticated mechanisms for doing authentication, understanding broader what's happening across the environment and feeding that into, you know, decisions that are made in terms of who gets to access. What data. So, >>yeah, good, Matt, bring us home overnight. You know, this pandemic has really heightened our awareness of cyber resiliency. Business continuity have changed our our mindset and definition of those two things. But give us your final thoughts on this top. >>I think it's probably just been into sharp focus, really what? It what it means to have mission critical applications that are right at the heart of your of your business. And, you know, you come to realize very quickly. But if those services are not available to your clients, I mean it can have such a long lasting implications So I think people embittering you know their strategy when it comes to, you know, millions off applications with infrastructure and all of that in the context of business continuity, I think people are gonna gonna have a much sharper focus in the future to really see, you know, what is what does it mean? And it's the lifeblood of their business is not able todo operate and serve their clients. And probably as well, more and more applications that maybe weren't considered mission critical in the past will be considered mission critical now because it's not just the back end services, but it's the way the community a reply. It's so a lot of that, I think, is going to play out the way that people think about their business continuity strategy in the future. >>Yeah, you're right. Video conferencing has become mission critical, isn't it? Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube again. You know, keep up the good work. Uh, I really appreciate your time and your insights. Always, always great talking, talking Z. So thanks again. >>Thank you. >>All right. Thank you for watching. Everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. Our wall to wall coverage of the think 2020 digital event experience. Keep right there. Right back after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next at NUTANIX. We're here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight were joined by Wendy M. Pfeiffer. She is the chief information officer at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Wendy, thank you for having me. And this is not your first time you this year. A Cube alum. >> I am a Cube alum. It's so much fun. It's kind of weird, though. We're inside of this Cuban outside of us is all the action in the Exposition Hall is kind of crazy and cool. >> It is that there's a lot of energy here. I want to start our conversation by taking you back in time to nineteen eighties. You growing up in Silicon Valley, you notice an advertisement in the newspaper that dead tree medium NASA wants ideas on how to organize its dashboard. Better for astronauts. Yeah, >> So they had a program called CD T I cockpit displays of traffic information and they were looking for innovative ideas to make what was really a very small display provide information for the shuttle astronauts as they were re entering the atmosphere. And so, if you can imagine coming back into the atmosphere, it very high speed. And there was concern that there would be a traffic in the area. Regular airplanes flying, you know, relatively much slower. And so how could the same air traffic displays that were used for aviators be sort of modified to give real time information? Teo the astronauts, I will tell you that I never contributed much to that project, but I discovered large scale computer systems. And I just love the idea of these things large networks, large computers on just the through the vast interconnectedness of things. And so that got me interested in technology, whereas before I thought I was interested in science and math. And it turns out, of course, there's some great synergy among those topics. >> So So the internship at NASA is what propelled your interest and really, what launched your career in technology? Yes. Now you are the CEO of Nutanix. This this amazing company thiss startup That's now billion dollars with the market cap in multiple billions of dollars. Yes. So talk a little bit about your experience as CEO and what and what in what you're hearing, particularly at this dot next show. Yeah, I think >> one of the things that's happening is we're all in the midst of a huge transformation in terms of how digital technology affects business and empowers and enables business and as CEOs were right in the middle of that Wei have. Many of us have tons of legacy equipment and things from vendors, but we also have this desire for leading digital transformation in our companies. And so companies like Nutanix and there aren't many companies like Nutanix, but technologies like ours bridge that gap. We can run the legacy workloads in on premise data centers on pick a vendor's hardware. But we can also run the same work loads on our operating system in public clouds. And so it's kind of the best of both worlds, and it bridges thes two worlds that CEOs have been struggling to bridge, and it does so in a way that doesn't require us to re train our people or find, you know, a small team of rocket scientists who are, you know, worth more than the GDP of small countries. So we're able Teo, actually execute. Still keep the lights on. Still do the the old school things that we need to do but also operate with excellence at that more modern end of the technology spectrum. That's huge. And I'm hearing that from so many folks all around the show, whether it's, you know, people who are responsible for infrastructure or Dev Ops kind of crosses all of those bridges. And and as Nutanix, the CEO, I get to represent how any company like ours a billion and a half dollars publicly traded company, can use technology to enable itself, because I use our technology to do all the things we need to do as a company. >> But that's exactly just what you're talking about. That balance that these companies need to strike with thinking about the maintenance, thinking about the storage, thinking about the protection, but then also thinking in a much more visionary in strategic way about how we really transform our business and get our and get the work done that we need to get done. Can you talk a little bit about the fact that these consumer technologies have really leapfrog the thie enterprise vendors and sort of embarrassing it, frankly, should be for these big technology behemoth that they haven't done more to make cooler, sleeker technologies? >> Absolutely. Oh, my gosh, this is my favorite topic. And it's why I have my smart here. So on this smartphone, this is a is an apple phone on this smartphone. I have a ton of applications and a ton of functionality, and you know, so I have Facebook on my smartphone, right? And I love Facebook. >> But when I >> downloaded and I started using Facebook, I didn't say, you know Oh my gosh, fall. Now I have my social media application. So there's no way I could use Twitter or Instagram or anything else because my standard is Facebook. And that's the only thing I'm going to use. No, no, no. I have a multitude of APS and I used them as I choose when I want to, in the way that I want Teo, those abs inherit things from this platform. They have access to my contact data. They understand my location if I allow them tio etcetera. So all of those things are unconsciously in what is actually a phone. Now try to get your desk phone to do that right? It doesn't. And yet in the enterprise space, we have vendors who are selling us for millions of dollars, desk phones, and those were supposed to be as performance delightful, interesting as this device. And then we have laptop computers and we have desktop computers. None of those things is even a third as interesting, engaging, useful and easy to use as this consumer attack, which, by the way, is a lot less expensive. I spend millions of dollars on a V audio visual room systems of conferencing technology, whereas when I go home I can se teoh Amazon or Google. Hey, you know Amazon. Show me my my shows. You know I can I can I can ask for any show I want to watch on TV. When I downloaded Pokey Mongo, I love playing video games and games. When I downloaded Pokemon go on my phone. I >> didn't have to >> watch, you know, five five minute video snippets to teach me how to install the application. Within minutes, I was, you know, catching all the Pokemon I could what in what is really a very complex application that also includes augmented reality. And so I think it's time that first of all the vendors who sell to us, who are so used to that every three years, the enterprise license agreement is renewed. Or, you know, Hey, we're a pick something, you know, a one hardware vendors shop. So we that's what we standardize on that is doing two things. One, they're killing their own industry, and they're also killing. They're they're ruining. It is ability to deliver and to be useful and transformative. Two companies way and it way also have to demand better way. Have to stop buying that Dunc. And we have to start finding ways whether we have to build it ourselves or using machine learning tools to train the machine on how to do these things that that enterprise it cos don't deliver to us. And we also need to look for vendors like Nutanix that build that bridge that allow us to stop worrying about Oh my gosh, You know, we've got to make this legacy thing work with this new thing. We don't have to worry about that so much anymore. And now we can focus on this user experience The interaction design what we might do within an ecosystem That is our own unique companies and our own unique set of systems and also ultimately allowing our people, which is what companies are made up of allowing our people to to have the experience that they want tohave, just like we do with our own devices. I can choose how I want to interact with this thing, and I can turn it off if I don't want to use it. >> So so much of what you're talking about is really about getting companies and then the leaders of these companies to think differently. And that is the biggest managerial challenge. And it's a challenge when you're in sales. And so how do you How do you approach that problem? Because it because you've really laid it out so clearly we are used, Teo, so much intuitiveness and ease and beauty in the technology that we use in our personal lives. And then we come to work way put up with a lot of junk. >> We do, right? I mean, like, I know you're not saying anything out loud, but I know you. You're agree without you here with your laptop on the table there. You know, first of >> all, our work forces are changing. Generally, we keep talking, at least in circles that I sit in about, you know, the millennials are entering the work force. No. You know, the Millennials and Jen Zy are already make up almost half of our workforce today and will be at that somewhere around. I think it's seventy percent by twenty, twenty five of the workforce, so >> they're already here. Those >> folks already have a different relationship with technology than my generation did my generation. And I'm a Magen axe, I think. Yeah. Um so my my hub to Exactly So the big >> hair A my generation. >> I >> watched the birth of some of these consumer technologies, but this next couple of generations grew up with him already in place. And so they don't even think about the fact that this is technology. This is dependent, just is just part of them. And so I think we need Thio, Throw off the old filters and get out of the way. It's a lot more about choice and self service and freedom and flexibility and a mixed portfolio. And there are so many ways to educate ourselves about those things if if we don't naturally have that instinct. But it starts with diverse thinking, diverse tools. I believe that whatever you know, PC Mac laptop tablet mobile device that you're comfortable with your company should enable you to use. And you should use the applications that that makes the most sense to that make you the most productive. And then it's his job or it's leaderships job to create that that really rich ecosystem, where those applications and tools have the nutrients that they need and the capabilities that they need to work together well, understanding how to create and maintain that ecosystem mean what is an ecosystem? It's this sort of happy accident of all sorts of creatures at various levels in the in the pyramid coming together and figuring out a way to cohabit and to survive and then, hopefully to thrive. And so no one can get too important. No one voice no one species. No one layer can be outsized compared to the others because of So what do you have? Well, you have a species collapse. They run out of the fuel that helps them to thrive. And so I think, of course, our planet at a macro level is an example of that. But our company's our families, our neighborhoods. All of those things are micro examples that that matched the macro and are dependant on the same laws of physics and science and so on in order to thrive in to function. >> Well, you're talking you You just highlighted the importance of diversity. And and you made this comment about No one person can get two important or no one part of the species. In fact, if you look at the tech landscape Ueno, who's too important and it's the pros who are who are running the show in a lot of ways. Still, I want to hear from you as a senior leader, a female senior leader in technology you noticed, >> and Theo the manicure. Yeah, >> but how? What? What do you see? What? Tell us what it's like. I mean, is it as bad as we hear? And, um, and and And how have you in your career overcome a lot of these challenges? And then how What do you see as your responsibility to the next generation who's coming up? >> Absolutely. So it is as bad as we hear. It's sometimes worse than we here. And I think that especially there are certain sectors of society and tech society where the bro culture that we've heard about is fully in play. What mitigates that is the human beings who make up the bro culture so often. These guys don't understand the the effect of all of them and mass, and so often they're just being natural. Many, especially start ups. The start of fuel. Silicon Valley, You know, they started with some great ideas and with some dreamers and often those those people with the great ideas and dreamers you know they are males, and what do you do? You get your buddies together. You know, when you get a little extra money, you get the next round of bodies. You invite people, you know, so >> there's a little >> bit of that syndrome that's happening. There are also wonderful incubators and fields where women are also in that start up mode, and I'm a member of the Board of Girls and Tech. We have a number of things like Way have an amplified competition that supports women, tech the entrepreneurs, so there's certainly more than just men. But the history has been that however, a lot of people talk about that For me, that's not the emphasis for me. The emphasis is on how we change our jobs and our definition of work in general. And this is so fascinating to me. >> I think we've been working for years >> and years on, you know, how do we get more women and stem and encourage girls to go through this path in school? You know, it turns out women and men are both equally interested in science and math and all those things. But the starting jobs and tech are are horrendous when it comes to matching women's interests in skills and this isthe stereo, I'm going to start stereotype here. I hate doing this, but in general terms, men tend to be able to work on things serially. They tend to have a singular focus and to appreciate the singular focus and so you can lay out a path first, your socks and your shoes and the guy will follow that, and we'LL master each step along the way. And that's that's a way that you know, it's stereotypically a lot of male brain brains. Progress for women, for female brains were multifaceted way sort of have this ability. I don't know if it's evolutionary or environment or whatever. I'm not like an expert, thank God. >> But we have this >> ability to multi task all the time. I could be, you know, holding my kid and, um, talking on the phone and, you know, making sure dinners cooking, okay. And, you know, maybe it's a business call, and I might be hiring someone or firing someone, and I'm giving equal focused attention to each very important task. And so we sort of have that that ability because we have that ability. That's the kind of job that you know. Okay, you enter college and you're taking a software development computer science, of course. And you take all computer science courses until you get that degree. And now you get your first software developer job and you sit in this little cubicle and all day long you write code. Well, you know, fine. If I've sort of have that single threaded mentality, I'm ready. All right. I guess I'm going to do this. I'm gonna Masters are >> gonna get through the layers >> of writing code as fast as I can and someday I'll rule the world or start my own company over on the female side, we say this is going to kill me. I don't want to do that. What a boring jobs. Because Because also, I'm interested in I'm interested in the Japanese language and I'm interested in design. And, you know, I love to cook. And also, you know, I'm just been working through, you know, theories of space and time and in my physics study, and to just have to focus my mind all by myself all day long in this cubicle on writing, you know, some part of a bigger program. It's not attractive. And so what we find is that women are dropping out of thes focus degree programs and they're dropping out of the early stages of technology careers. Which means that by the time you get to my stage, there is not a very few of us right, >> So you said we needed we need to change the definition of work. Yes, What does that mean? >> Well, the Millennials and Gen Z and countries that are that are very young, like some of the Eastern European countries that air, that air, just reinventing themselves. They've already done that. It's the gig economy. It's the idea that as an individual, I can choose the things I want to work on. We've tried Teo, sort of emulate that in in the agile methodologies right? I get to choose my tasks, but it's this sort of. It was taken the soul out of it. But this is really that independent contractors might be doing. You know a few things that once I might be designing shoes like one of my friends is she's she's created her own shoe company, and at the same time I might be writing code Azaz a gig for some other company. And you know what? I might also be involved in, you know, a charitable work. Or I might be volunteering at my kid's school and doing all of those things together at the same time in parallel is interesting to us. It's engaging to us. We put more. >> So how'd you do that? At your team at NUTANIX? How do you help your employees, uh, do all the things that they want to do in addition to obviously getting their work done? Yeah, well, It's always a >> balance right. One of the really important things is to create an environment of tools and technologies and processes that allow people to choose the things they want to choose. It's not always well understood. Some people say thank you. I get to use the tools I like. Other people say there's too many tools what we d'Oh. And so we try to find something down the middle for those guys. Exactly. Secondly, I hire and mentor leaders who are very diverse and open, and they're thinking so that we can constantly kind of reinvent ourselves as an I T organization. But ultimately it gets down to enabling culturally people to think differently, to raise their hand and say, You know, I am a network engineer, but I would like Tio automate this thing over here or, you know, I Yes, I'm a systems engineer, but I'd like to deploy the network, just allowing them to get out of their comfort zone and to experiment. It's also really important to understand the balance of it. People who choose it love engineering and love technology, but we'LL also love process and interaction, and so we're already this mash up of personality types. And, you know, I would say more multifaceted you are, the more you're able to play multiple sports or or have multiple skills or play offense and defense, then the more able you are to thrive in the new World in the new economy. And sometimes it's just finding those mavericks Or, you know, I like to say I'm a little civil, like, you know, I've >> got a little personalities and you know it. Sometimes you got >> to bring one of those personalities to the table. Sometimes you have to bring many of those personalities to the table, and it's gonna be okay for folks to do that. >> I love it. I love it. Great. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always fun talking to you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching the Cube. They'LL be much more to come

(big band music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Your file was so big, it might be very useful, but now it is gone. Oh wait, we're not talking about those type of haikus. Happy to welcome to the program the new CEO of HYCU. That's H-Y-C-U. Simon Taylor, the rebranded company, formerly Comtrade, I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. Simon, great to see you. >> Great to see you as always. >> Yeah so I've corked a quick Google search. Give me some technology things. I believe it's actually like a former V expert, that friend of mine had it in his deep archive, he's got all these things about Windows and the like. So let's start there. We've had you on the program, when it was Comtrade, explain the HYKU, the name and how it fits with the other company, everything like that. >> Absolutely, so a huge shift since the last time we all spoke. As you might remember, Comtrade Software was a data protection, a mondering company, but it was part of a larger organization. We spun it out of Comtrade Group and rebranded as a new company, HYKU. HYKU stands for Hyper Converge Uptime and, really, the way we came up with the name is we were thinking about the fact that we sell data protection for the hyper-converger Enterprise Cloud. More specifically, purposed-filled backup recovery for Nutanix. And when we think about hyper-converger, what are we really doing? We're taking enormous amounts of data and we're simplifying it down to a nice, small elegant package, much like the Japanese poem, haiku. So we leveraged that name, haiku, and then create HYCU, Hyper-converged Up-time. >> Yeah and if you kept the Enterprise Cloud and everything like that, it would've been a much longer word. (laughing) >> Absolutely right. >> Alright, but let's speak to, Comtrade and now HYCU's been working with Nutanix for a lot, tell us what you're hearing from your customers, what's shaping the market, what's it like being in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we found it to be absolutely wonderful. HYCU, Inc. now, is really the world's only purpose-built backup recovery product for Nutanix. We've got about 350 employees in five different countries. And we launched about eight months ago, our very own backup and recovery product for Nutanix. When we thought about what kind of product we wanted to build as our own stand-alone company, we knew it had to be in hyper-converged, we knew that Nutanix was the industry leader and we'd had so much respect for Nutanix and for their leadership for so many years, as you remember. We had brought the monitoring scompact for Nutanix to market about three years ago, and we thought our real legacy has been in the data protection space. We've been working with companies all across the world for 25 years, from an engineering perspective, supporting the development of blue-chip data protection products, and we thought what better than to build our own back-up recovery product? And if we're going to do that, we should do it for the industry leader in hyperconvergion Enterprise Cloud which is Nutanix. So when we thought about what it would take to build an HCI backup and recovery product, we said, you know what, we don't want to be the platform. Nutanix, in our opinion, is the platform. And they've got snapshots and cloning and replication built in to their product. So we said, rather than creating another beast, another platform, another silo, let's leverage the elegance of Nutanix and let's add to it application awareness, let's add to it all of the various different cataloging, and application support that would be required to actually provide a complete data protection solution to Nutanix customers. It's been wonderful, and in just eight months, we're now in 22 countries around the world. >> So, 350 people, this is a crowded space. There's a lot of start-ups, there's a lot of established companies, why Nutanix? The focus is for such a large company, what's the total addressable market for the product, and what's the attraction amongst Nutanix customers? >> Those are great questions, Keith. And absolutely, I think this is the question on everybody's mind, how big can Nutanix really get? In our eyes, you can guess the correlarity for us. We believe where Nutanix are where VMware were a decade ago, and that they're going to keep going. I think we've heard it from the Nutanix Executive Team, you know, they want to be a three billion dollar company, et cetera, and I think they're going to hit it. I think they're going to absolutely just grow and grow and grow and really be the platform of the future. So from our perspective, this is the most crowded space in technology and a very difficult place to penetrate. I would certainly not recommend anyone building a sort of plain vanilla backup solution and saying, "Hey, here we are." I just don't think it will work. But when you look at Nutanix, and you look at the evolution of data protection, starting with Unex, there was a solution for that, Windows, there was a very relevant solution for that, virtualization, another backup and recovery product. Now we're in Cloud and Enterprise Cloud, and there's a couple of new vendors that have appeared on the market, and they're all sort of saying the same thing, which is it's all about the application, it's all about integration, and gosh, it's got to be very usable. It's got to be Next-Gen and it's got to be focused on the consumer. It's got to be something that people want to use, that really has that simplicity and that elegance. The core difference is that, unlike some of the other HCI backup vendors, we've focused almost entirely on building it for Nutanix, which means that we can leverage the power of their platform and make our customers more successful. In terms of total adjustable market, what we wanted to do was say to customers, "You only should have one data protection solution "for your environment." So what we did is we added a V80P integration, so you can actually backup and recover not only Nutanix data but all of your Legacy VMware data as well through HYCU, okay? But we only market it to Nutanix customers, so what that enables us to do is to provide unified data protection solutions for Nutanix customers which helps them to more quickly migrate customers and workloads to new Nutanix bosses. >> So as far as that support for Legacy workloads, we talked to quite a few Nutanix customers and they're in a mixed environment where a percentage of the workload's on Nutanix, a percentage of the workload's are outside of Nutanix, so does that support, extend not only-- >> Both. >> From the virtual machines, but physical machines outside of the Nutanix scope? >> Sure, so we're at V3.0 right now. We've been out for about eight months. In our latest release we've added VSX supports, you can backup all of your Legacy infrastructure. We are adding physical and Q4 this year as well. So you're really looking at a comprehensive Enterprise-ready HCI Enterprise Cloud solution that leverages the power of Nutanix to make their customers more successful than ever before. >> Okay, great, so VMware and HV today, Bare Metal coming to the future. Let's talk about that Cloud piece bit. Nutanix partnerships in putting their environment into AWS, Microsoft, of course, Google, really, so all the backup players are talking about how they fit in this multi-Cloud world, so how does HYCU fit? >> Yeah. You know what we did, we actually repurposed HYCU, and we launched our own Google Cloud services backup product. It's in the Google Cloud Services Store, you can download it and you can actually leverage that as well. But I see that as the precursor. I think we, on the HYCU team, all see that as the precursor to Zy. We love what Nutanix is doing with Google on Zy. We think that's going to be a real game changer for them. And what we wanted to make sure is that we really understood the concepts behind it so that when they start launching workloads on Zy, we're right there, ready with Zy integration. >> So give us some hero numbers. What are some of the big features that you guys offer Nutanix customers that other data protection companies can't do? >> Sure. So one of the key things, Keith, is that from a Nutanix perspective, we actually integrate right at the storage level, so we're not going at the hypervisor level, and what that means is that we avoid something called VM-stung. So when we think about customers who are trying to recover their data, in a traditional hypervisor environment where you're backing up at the hypervisor level, you're going to see that VM-stung, you're going to see things freeze up a little bit when you're doing the recovery. By backing up and recovering directly from the storage level, we avoid that entire process. The second thing that we've done is we've actually patented application awareness. Now this is great thing, we leveraged it in the monitoring tools, Stu's going to remember that, and we brought that back in a totally new form for the data protection. What we do is we actually look inside the virtual machines, we can see what applications are there, we reconstruct them ourselves, and that enables self-service recovery on the part of the Nutanix Abna. So now when Nutanix Abna can say I want to restore a sequel, I want to restore exchange, I want to get an email back, they can do all of that themselves right from the solution. >> Alright, Simon, last thing I want to cover is what feedback are you hearing from the show here? What are the customers excited about? You've been to quite a few of these also, what's your wrap-up of the show? >> I think this is by far the most successful Nutanix event ever, and I think it's been a wonderful scale-up approach for everyone here. I think we're starting to see a lot more in the Federal space, certainly, we're starting to see a lot more, for both Nutanix and HYCU, kind of across the larger enterprises, and I think what people are starting to see is that they can actually move entire environments to Nutanix. And I think more and more workloads are shifting faster than ever before and these guys have just really found scale. That's been a terrific thing to see and obviously fantastic for our business as well. >> Alright. Simon Taylor, CEO of HYCU, pleasure to catch up with you as always. We'll be back with lots more programming here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 for Keith Townsend, Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. And we're thrilled to welcome to the program, two N users here at the show. We have Sharon Haris, who is the CTO of Assulta Medical Centers out of Israel. I also have Paul Stallings, he's the Vice President of IT infrastructure services, Guidewell with Florida Blue. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, Paul let's start with you. Just give us a little bit about your role and your organization. >> Sure, I work for Guidewell. We're a health solutions company. We started out as an insurance company, primarily. Now we've moved to a solutions. So, we are the provider side and the payer side. I run IT infrastructure services, which is the shared services among five different companies under the Guidewell brand. >> Great and Sharon? >> Assulta Medical Centers is the largest chain of private hospitals in Israel. We have four hospitals and four clinics spreading across the country from North to South. We are connecting about one million radiology tests and examinations per year, and about 15% of the in-house surgeries in Israel. >> Yeah, well luckily both of you, in your industries, my usual joke is, nothing's changing. You have huge budgets. (laughing) Unlimited staff. And no challenges. >> Sharon: At all. >> Paul, before we get into the Nutanix solutions of course you're using, tell us about some of the drivers for change in your business, your work. You know, some of the challenges and opportunities you're facing. >> Yeah, sure. We are really in a growth mode in our organization. In the last six years, we've actually grown to these five companies. We went from an eight billion dollar company to a $16 billion company. We're in a huge trajectory and transformation is the key. And we have to have high availability. We have to be able to meet our customer's needs. We have to be able to scale and be agile. And that's thrown at me every day. >> Stu: Sharon? >> Yeah, now we're in the healthcare industry. We have both ends. On one end, we have to maintain stability and performance and redundancy. Because we are working 24-7, 365 days a year. And on the other end, we must be innovative in innovation, and make everything for our user and customers very available, very approachable, because users don't want to come to our clinics and hospitals. They want to do everything from home. So, as much as we can, we are giving them the opportunity to do it. >> Stu: Yeah, digitization. >> So, Paul that's amazing growth, eight billion to 16 billion. Whether it's organic, inorganic. That's a major shift in capability. What have been some of the primary challenges from a technology perspective as you guys have gone through that major growth period. >> Yeah, I think the velocity is one of the biggest challenges for us. Being able to grow, we really need solutions that we can really want to modually grow, want pay to grow and scale better. It's really hard when you have that much growth to do the legacy where you think about, in the next three years I need this much capacity, because it's unpredictable because the growth is so fast. If that makes sense. >> Yeah, it's impossible to forecast. >> Right, absolutely. >> It's impossible. >> I had a CIO that tells me the data costs are getting out of control. I say, you know what? As long as the data is growing, that means that the business is growing. >> Paul: Absolutely. >> So, hard drives are definitely the thing that you want to buy. So, as you both deal with growth, stability, capability challenges, What appeals about the Nutanix story to you? >> I think one of the things that I just mentioned. That pay to grow opportunity is huge for us. The simplicity is huge. The availability and really trying to get to automation. I really have to do more with less. We're growing so fast, I can't even onboard folks fast enough. So, I think that simplicity, that automation and that pay to grow model is great for us. >> So, we're in the digital era. So we need to supply our users once again, as I said before, digital application. And to be able to execute those needs very quickly. And we're looking towards the cloud. And you can't really have public cloud readiness in services, unless you have private cloud readiness in services. So, Nutanix for me is the best solution for automation, as Paul said. And to begin the process to achieve the collection between private and public cloud. >> That's an interesting point. Could you expand on that? What do you mean by, what does private cloud mean to you? And most customers you hear, oh, we're doing some development. We're trying some new products in the public cloud. You flipped that some. >> Yeah, I spoke here yesterday in one of the session. And I ask the audience, how much time it takes to fire up a ritual machine from a template? And the answer was like between half and hour and one hour. I thought, one hour, that's cool. And how much time it takes for you to take this machine and join it to the CRM or the SharePoint or the Epic or the SAP farm? And the answer was about a week. So, where did seven days go? Why is the gap so huge between one hour and a week? And the answer is because the lack of automation. For me, the public cloud is exactly like, sorry, private cloud is exactly like public cloud. The same services, the same abilities to execute and generate services level. Not server level, because server level would be Dell. Like if you, 10 or 15 years ago, we are already there. Services level is the same ability that we have in the public level. >> Paul, I would love to hear your comments on how Cloud fits into your environment. >> Yeah, absolutely. 'Cause we're in the health industry, private cloud is paramount. But we really need the hybrid because we want to be able to burst and scale and have that agility. But to a lot of things that Sharon said, I do need that automation, I do need the scaleability, but I definitely need some commonality on my stacks. I have a shared services. I have to build a scale. I have to be able to have best prices. I need to be able to compete and collaborate with the private and public sectors. >> So, let's talk about some of the services that Nutanix offers. First let's start in the private cloud. A lot of great announcements. One of the things that, I have actually from Nutanix, I've heard about them is basically what they're delivering in AFF. I'm sorry, AFS, a foul services solution. Are you guys using any of those foul or type solutions within your own environment? >> No yet, we are not using the foul solution in biomechanics, but we're using the other services such as the big data verification with the Cloud data, because we are using, actually, a built environment for our new research development company that we signed in, big data, cloud data, dupe and in line, and we did it very quickly, and stability-wise and performance-wise, and file services-wise, because it's big data, you know? It's a different kind of perception over there, and Nutanix gives us very quickly a deployment and services that we needed for this project. >> Could you just expand on that? When you say it was a fast deployment, you know, days? >> Yeah, our CEO signed the contract with this company and said, okay, I want it to be ready in like, two weeks from now. And then I thought, okay I can do it traditionally, and it would probably take me a month, or even more, and I can do it with Nutanix, and Nutanix wasn't ready in this time, with Cloud Data verification. Nutanix promised me that they would support me 100%, I got a letter from the VP of R&D of Nutanix, that they would support me, and they would get the certification. Now, most of the vendors that want to sell you something they say, "yeah, we'll get it, no worries", and they deliver. First of all, they give us full support, in the duration of the implementation of the environment. And, they did get the certification a few months later. So, performance-wise, we did the test, so I know that it works. We've duplicated the Cloud there, by the way, when there was performance issues, it was, Cloud Data fine-tuned what we need to do. It wasn't Nutanix' at all. Really, I really like this product, but they really deliver, so, performance-wise, execution-wise, and stability. >> We met the deadline that your-- >> I met the deadline, the medical staff is behind schedule, but I did my part. >> So Paul, what are any, is there any particular service that you use within the Nutanix Private Cloud that you want to talk about? >> Well, we're pretty new to the Nutanix suite of services, but one thing that's unique about our organization is we're one of the first to not do x86, but do power systems as well. So, we wanted that one pane of glass, one cloud management system that we can actually do all of our workloads. So we really just, we started x86 but we just recently got our power infrastructure up and running, about 100 nodes, and that's working well as well. And we're happy to have both sides of the fence, and really look at all our workload through that single pane of glass. >> Great, can you tell me what workload are you running on that, and do you have any AIX that you might look to put on that, now that that's going to be supported? >> Yeah, so we're really now starting to look at things with Kubernetes, then we've started putting our open enrollment applications on, because that's really our season now, right? It's kind of our busiest timeframe, when I have the highest availability, I have to be able to scale, and want to have zero downtimes. So, that one click, we love those kind of capabilities, and that's really helping us with our new applications for open enrollment. >> So, let's talk about Nutanix' vision. You both are cloud-forward thinking organizations, as you look at Zy, as you look at integration of calm with the major cloud providers, what are your initial thoughts? >> I think that, you know, I think that Zy's really interesting, where I can have those recovery options. You know, I really think we really got to move infrastructure to resiliency, and make sure it's resilient, but it's always nice to have that backup and be able to click over very quickly, as opposed to traditional recovery model where you back it up and you have to restore it. We don't want to restore. We want to be able to bring that back up and have that high availability. So I'm really interested in the Zy piece. >> Yeah, and we got the budget for the DR this year. And, we needed to take into consideration the best DR module for Assulta. Now, to be honest with you, if a regulation would allow us, I wouldn't think twice. But this is a variable that I need to check with my legal department, but technology-wise Zy is a amazing solution. In terms of cloud as a centerfold, I believe that there is no other option. There's no other option but to build your private and move it towards public cloud services. By the way, the main barrier for me is the human barrier. Because we need to train our personnel, we need to change the way they think, we need to combine between system guys and networking, and security guys, because now it's one box. So it's quite the challenge, but Nutanix makes a difference. >> Alright, it's the first time for both of you attending this show, Paul, start with you, if you can tell us what brought you to the show, what you're hoping to accomplish, what you've learned so far, general experiences here. >> Yeah, so you know, Nutanix is really helping us build out our private cloud. We definitely know that even though healthcare has a lot of regulatory requirements, we don't want to do full public, we know we're going to have to start moving more and more into the cloudspace. So, we know there's different cloud players out there, but we want to have that mobility of our workloads and move them in and out, and move them back to our environment, and move them from cloud provider to cloud provider and I've definitely started hearing about a lot of the services that Nutanix provides, that it enables those kind of solutions, and I want to learn more about those. >> For me, Nutanix is bringing to the table new ideas, new perception, and the most important thing that they gave us, giving us things that we need. And you talked about Zy, you talked about Com, there's been a new concept and they are always moving ahead and they bring the market to chase them. If I could say this way. And for me, the most important thing is that everything is posted in one box, and able to do it very simple by automation processes. >> So one question around people, you're growing at, doubling the organization, as you go out and look for staff to augment your existing staff, and innovate the change, how does Nutanix help or hinder in the hiring process? Like, onboarding new employees, you said onboarding is a challenge, onboarding and training, commentary around that? >> Yeah, so, you know, people are our most precious assets, right? And, when you hire new, you want to get the best people you can get, right? So, I think that we definitely tried to identify folks that have the type of aptitude we need. We're not always able to find the folks that are skilled with all the solutions we need, because cloud is so diverse, and converge is so diverse with the stacks, but we actually are doing a better job with finding the right talent, or training the ones that we have up, and to prepare and give the training to the new folk that are coming through the door. But our onboarding is definitely an opportunity for us, and I think we'll be able to scale a little bit better with onboarding as we look at automation, automation is going to be the key to getting folks onboarded faster. >> So Sharon, what about you? How has Nutanix helped with your, not necessarily onboarding, because growth is not necessarily changed, but people change. >> Yeah, people change. And the market has changed as well. And people must understand, that they should embrace the change. Even I change each and every day. I learn new things, I implement new things, I dare and I challenge my organization, and I have to convince my finance and my CIO and my CEO that this technology, whether Nutanix or other technology, is the right technology for our organization. Now, Nutanix is helping us in terms of innovation because of the fact that we're beginning to sign contracts with startups. And, we have to build them labs, and combine them with our production environment but do it very smartly, in a sophisticated way. So, Nutanix with the microsegmentation and other features that they are having is very helpful for us in this area, as well. >> Last thing I wanted to ask: lessons learned. You're relatively new in this space, but always things that you look back and say, "What could I have done better", "What I wish I knew a little better", Paul, start with you as to talking with your peers, what would you recommend to them, and what changes might they make? >> You know, I think we're so new into it, we don't have a lot of lessons learned yet, because we're just really going into production with a lot of the systems that we have, especially on the AIXI and the power side, but I do think that we are doing a debrief, probably coming up in the next 30 days to really identify if there are opportunities that we could probably do differently. Now, I will say that I do want to look at the whole private cloud to public cloud opportunities and really understand what those challenges are, because I think from an application perspective, that we don't always build applications that we plan to bring back. So, I need to really partner with my development shops, that when they build applications, how do we make sure that we can bring those workloads back, and I want to understand some of those cost models. >> That's awesome. >> I would say choosing the right use case and to prepare for the implementation, plan as much as you can, because those things will make or break if you're a beginner. If you're already accustomed to things, you know what to do. But if you're a beginner, those things are very important and combined with a good or very good integrator because, once again, if you want to succeed in this project, because it's not a project, it's not that service that we install. If you go with this method, then you didn't learn anything. So, if you want to get the best out of Nutanix, and thanks, to offer a lot of services we discussed, you should do it. >> Alright, Sharon and Paul, thank you so much for sharing your stories. For Keith Townsend and Stu Miniman, we always love to talk to all the users here, and I'm glad to be able to bring them to you, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

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