>>Welcome back to Los Angeles, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here on day three of the cubes, coverage of coop con and cloud native con north America, 21, Dave, we've had a lot of great conversations. The last three days it's been jam packed. Yes, it has been. And yes, it has been fantastic. And it's been live. Did we mention that it's inline live in Los Angeles and we're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. David Stephanie is here. The CEO of Trulio David. Welcome back. It's good to see you. >>Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. Isn't it great to be in person? Oh man. It's been a reunion. >>It hasn't been a reunion and they have Ubered been talking about these great little, have you seen these wristbands that they have? I actually asked >>For two, cause I'm a big hugger, so >>Excellent. So, so here we are day three of coupon. That's actually probably day five, our third day of coverage. I'm losing track to it's Friday. I know that, that I can tell you, you guys announced two dot five a couple of weeks ago. Tell us what's in that. What's exciting. Before we crack open Twilio, uh, choy. >>Sure, sure. Well, it's been exciting to be here. Look, the theme right of resiliency realize has been it's right up our wheelhouse, right? To signal that more people are getting into production type of environments. More people require data protection for cloud native applications, right? And, uh, there's two dot five releases. It is as an answer to what we're seeing in the market. It really is centered predominantly around, uh, ransomware protection. And uh, you know, for us, when we look at this, I I've done a lot of work in, in cybersecurity, my career. And we took a hard look about a year ago around this area. How do we do this? How do we participate? How do we protect and help people recover? Because recovery that's part of the security conversation. You can talk about all the other things, but recovery is just as important. And we look at, uh, everything from a zero trust architecture that we provide now to adhering, to NIST standards and framework that's everything from immutability. Uh, so you can't touch the backups now, right? Uh, th that's fine to encryption, right? We'll encrypt from the application all the way to that, to the storage repository. And we'll leverage Keem in that system. So it's kind of like Bitcoin, right? You need a key to get your coin. You as an end-user only have your key to your data alone. And that's it. So all these things become more and more important as we adopt more cloud native technology. And >>As the threat landscape changes dramatically. >>Oh yeah. I got to tell you right. Every time we, you, you publish an application into another cloud, it's a new vector, right? So now I'm living in a multi-cloud world where multiple applications in my data now lives, right? So people are trying to attack backups through, uh, consoles and the ministry of consoles to the actual back of themselves. So new vectors, new problems need new solutions. >>And you mentioned, you mentioned something, you, you, you asked the question, how do we participate? And we are here at KU con uh, w uh, cloud native foundation. So what about, what's your connection to the open source community and efforts there? How do you participate in that? >>Yeah, so it's a really great question because, you know, uh, we are a closed source solution that focuses all of our efforts on the open source community and protecting cloud native applications. Our roots have been protecting cloud native applications since 2013, 2014, and with a lot of very large logos. And, um, you know, through time there are open source projects that do emerge, you know, in this community. And for example, Valero is an open source data protection platform, um, for all of its goodness, as a, as a community-based project, they're also deficiencies, right? So Valero in itself is, uh, focuses only on label based applications. It doesn't really scale. It doesn't have a UI it's really CLI driven, which is good for some people and it's free. But you know, if you need to really talk about an enterprise grade platform, this is where we pick up, you know, we, in our last release, we gave you the ability to capture your Valero based backups. And now you want to be an adult with an enterprise caliber, you know, backup solution and continue to protect your environment and have compliance and governance needs all satisfied. That's where, that's where we really stand out. >>Well, when you're talking to customers in any industry, what are the things that you talk about in terms of relief, categorizing the key differentiators that really make Trulia stand out above the competition? >>Yeah. Cause there, there a bunch of, they're a bunch of great competitors out there. There's no doubt about it. A lot of the legacy folks that you do see perhaps on those show floor, they do tuck in Valero and under the, under the covers, they can check a box or you can set aside some customer needs some of the pure play people that, that we do see out there, great solutions too. But really where we shine is, you know, we are the most flexible agnostic solution that there is in this market. And we've had people like red hat and Susa and verandas, digital ocean and HPS morale. And the list goes on, certify, say, Trulio is the solution of choice. And now no matter where you are in this journey or who you're using, we have your back. So there's a lot of flexibility. There we are complete storage agnostic. >>We are cloud agnostic in going back to how you want to build our architecture application. People are in various phases in their, in their journey. A lot of times, many moons ago, you may have started with just a label based application. Then you have another department that has a new technique and they want to use helm, or you may be adopting open shift and you're using operators to us. It doesn't matter. You have peace of mind. So whether you have, you have to protect multiple departments or you as an end user, as one single tenant are using various techniques, we'll discover or protect and we can move forward. >>So if you looked at, if you look at it from a workload basis, um, and you look at your customers are the workloads that you're protecting. What's, what's the mix of what you think of as legacy virtualized things versus containerized things. And then, and then, and then the other kind of follow on to that is, um, are you seeing a lot of modernization and migration or are you seeing people leave the legacy things alone and then develop net new in sort of separate silos? >>Yeah. So that's a great question. And I, to tell you the answer varies, that's, that's the honest answer, right? You end up having, you may have a group or a CIO that says, look, your CTO says, we're moving to this new architecture. The water's great, bring your applications in. And so either it's, we're going to lift and shift an application and then start to break it apart over time and develop microservices, or we're gonna start net new. And it really does run, run the gambit. And so, you know, as we look at, for some of those people, they have peace of mind that they can bring their two on applications in and we can recover. And for some people that say, look, I'm going to start brand new, and these are gonna be stateless applications. Um, we've seen this story before, right? Our, our, uh, uh, I joke around, it's kinda like the movie Groundhog's day. >>Uh, you know, we, we started many moons ago within the OpenStack world and we started with stateless to stateful. Always, always, always finds a way, but for the stateless people, um, when you start thinking about security, I've had conversations with CSOs around the world who say, I'm going to publish a stainless application. What I'm concerned about things like drift, you know, what's happening in runtime may be completely different than what I intended. So now we give you the ability to capture that runtime state compare. The two things identify what's changed. If you don't like what you see, and you can take that point in time recovery into a sandbox and forensically take it apart. You know, one of our superpowers, if you will, is the, our point in time, backups are all in an open format. Everyone else has proprietary Schemos. So the benefit of an open format is you have the ability to leverage a lot of third party tooling. So take a point in time, run scanners across it. And it, God forbid Trulio goes away. You still have access and you can recreate a point in time. So when you start thinking about compliance, heavy environments, think about telcos, right? Or financial institutions. They have to keep things for 15 years, right? Technologies change, architectures change. You can't have that lock-in >>So we continue to thrive. And on that front, one of the marketing terms that we hear a lot, and I want to get your opinion on this as a feature proofing, how do you, what does, what does it mean to you and Trillium and how do you enable that for organizations, like you said, for the FSI is I have to keep data for 15 years and other industries that have to keep it for maybe even longer. >>I mean, right. The future proof, uh, you know, terminology, that's part of our mantra actually, when I talked about, you know, a superpower being as agnostic and flexible as can be right, as long as you adhere to standards, right? The standards that are out here, we have that agnostic play. And then again, not just capturing an applications, metadata data, but that open format, right? Giving you that open capability to unpack something. So you're not, there is no, there is no vendor lock-in with us at all. So all these things play a part into, into future-proofing yourself. And because we live and breathe cloud native applications, you know, it's not just Kubernetes right? Over the course of time, there'll be other things, right. You're going to see mixed workloads too. They're gonna be VM based in the cloud and container based in the cloud and server lists as well. But you, as long as you have that framework to continuously build off of it, that's, that's where we go. You know, uh, it shouldn't matter where your application lives, right? At the end of the day, we will protect the application and its data. It can live anywhere. So conversations around multi-cloud change, we start to think and talk across cloud, right? The ability to move your application, your data, wherever it, wherever it needs to be to. >>Well, you talked about recoverability and that is the whole point of backing up video. You have to be able to recover something that we've seen in the last 18, 19 months. Anyone can backup >>Data. >>That's right. That's right. If you can't recover it, or if you can't recover it in time. Yeah. We're talking like going on a business potential and we've seen the massive changes in the security landscape in the last 18, 19 months ransomware. I was looking at some, some cybersecurity data that showed that just in the first half of this calendar year, January one to June 30, 20, 21, ransomware was up nearly 11 X DDoS attacks are up. We've got this remote workforce. That's going to probably persist for a while. So the ability to recover data from not if we get hit by ransomware, but when we get hit by ransomware is >>When you're, you're absolutely right. And, and, and to your plate anyway. So anyone can back up anything. When you look at it, it's at its highest form. We talk about point time where you orchestration, right. Backup is a use case. Dr. Is a use case, right? How do you, reorchestrate something that's complex, right? The containers, these applications in the cloud native space, there are morphous, they're living things, right? The metadata is different from one day to the next, the data itself is different from when one day the net to the next. So that's, what's so great about Trillium. It's such an elegant solution. It allows your, reorchestrate a point in time when and where you need it. So yes. You have to be able to recover. Yes. It's not a matter of if, but when. Right. And that's why recovery is part of that security conversation. Um, you know, I I've seen insurance companies, right? They want to provide insurance for ransomware. Well, you're gonna have enough attacks where they don't want to provide that insurance anymore. It costs too much. The investment that you make with, with Trulio will save you so much more money down the road. Right. Uh, who's our product manager actually gave a talk about that yesterday and the economics were really interesting. >>Hmm. So how has the recovery methodology who participates in that changed over time? As, as we, you know, as we are in this world of developer operators who take on greater responsibility for infrastructure things. Yeah. Who's, who's responsible for backup and recovery today and how, how has that changed >>Everyone? Everyone's responsible. So, you know, we rewind however many years, right? And it used predominantly CIS admin that was in charge of backup administrator, but a ticket in your backup administrator, right. Cloud native space and application lifecycle management is a team sport. Security is a team sport. It's a holistic approach. Right? So when you think about the, the team that you put out on the field, whether your DevOps, your SRE dev sec ops it ops, you're all going to have a need for point in time, we orchestration for various things and the term may not be backup. Right? It's something else. And maybe for test dev purposes, maybe for forensic purposes, maybe for Dr. Right. So I say it's a team sport and security as a holistic thing that everyone has to get on board with >>The three orchestration is exactly the right way to talk about absolute these processes. It's not just recovery, you're rebuilding >>Yeah. A complex environment. It's always changing. >>That's one of the guarantees. It's always going to be changing >>That much. >>Can you give us a, leave us with a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what Trulio delivers? >>Yeah. So it's interesting. I won't say who the customer is, but I'll tell you it's in the defense agency, it's a defense agency. Uh, they have developers all over the place. Uh, they need self-service capabilities for the tenants to mind their own backups. So you don't need to contact someone, right. They can build, they have one >>Dashboard, single pane of glass or truth to manage all their Corinthians applications. And it gives them that infrastructure to progress whether your dev ops or not your it ops, uh, this, this group has rolled it out across the nation and they're using in their work with very sensitive environments. So now we have they're back. And what are some of the big business outcomes that they're achieving already? >>The big business outcomes? Well, so operational efficiencies are definitely first and foremost, right? Empowering the end user with more tools, right? Because we've seen this shift left and people talking about dev ops, right. So how do I empower them to do more? So I see that operational efficiency, the recoverability aspect, God forbid, something goes wrong. How do you, how do you do that in the cost of that? Um, and then also, um, being native to the environment, the Trillium solution is built for Kubernetes. It is built on go. It is a Qubit stateless Kubernetes application. So you have to have seamless integration into these environments. And then going back to what I was saying before, knowing peace of mind, the credibility aspect, that it is blessed by, you know, red hat and suicide Mirandas and all these other, other folks in the field, um, that you can guarantee it's going to work >>Well, that helps to give your customers the confidence that there, and that confidence might sound trivial. It's not, especially when we're talking about security, it's not at all that, that's a, that's a big business outcome for you guys. When a customer says, I'm confident I have the right solution, we're going to be able to recover when things happen, we try, we fully trust in the solution that we're, >>And we'll bring more into production faster that helps everyone out here too. Right? It feels good. You have that credibility. You have that assurance that I can move faster and I can move into different clouds faster. And that's, we're gonna continue to put, we're gonna continue to push the envelope there. You know, coming a, as we look into, you know, going forward, we're going to come out with other capabilities. That's going to continue to differentiate ourselves from, from folks. Uh, we'll, we'll talk about in time, the ability to propagate data across multiple clouds simultaneously. So making RTOs look at the split seconds and minutes. And so I hope that we can have that conversation next time we were together, because it's really exciting. >>Any, any CTA that you want to give to the audience, any, any, uh, like upcoming or recent webinars that you think they would be really benefit from? >>I guess one thing I put out there is that, um, I understand that people need to continuously learn. There is a skillset hole in, in this market. We can, we understand that, you know, and people look to us as not just a vendor, but a partner. And a lot of the questions that we do get are how do I do this? Or how do I do that? Engage us, ask us to consume our product is really, really easy. You can download from the website or go to an, you know, red hats operator hub, or go to the marketplace over at Susa, and let's begin to begin and we're here to help. And so reach out, right? We want everyone to be successful. >>Awesome. trillium.io. David, thank you for joining us. This has been an exciting conversation. Good >>To see you all. >>Likewise. Good to see you in person take care. We look forward to the next time we see you when unpacking what other great things are going on on Trulia. We appreciate your >>Time. Thank you so much. Good to be here >>For David's fie and David Nicholson, the two Davids I'm going to sandwich. I'm Lisa Martin, you we're coming to you live from Los Angeles. This is Q con cloud native con north America, 2021. Stick around our next guest joins us momentarily.

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I am Stu Miniman and welcome to this special cube conversations. We're here with Dell Technology to share the news of an update to one of their product lines. We've watched for a number of years, Dell has taken their portfolio like I said they powered them up. So, of course the servers are known for a long time PowerEdge and we've seen many of the storage products and like going through their power up and here we have is the PowerFlex. So people that are familiar with what's happening in the software defined storage and hyper-converged space will remember the VX flex, so it's powered up. Joining me to discuss this important announcement, we have Matthew Paul, who's the Senior Director of Product Management and Anthony Cinelli, who's the Senior Director of Business Development, both with Dell Technologies. Matt, let's jump right into it. PowerFlex, powering up this segment of the market, give us the importance and what the announcement is. >> Great, thank you Stu thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to announce that we're powering up our product and we're moving our VxFlex product through the new power brand and the power name, really responding to customers and our customers taking this product on and aligning it and using it to be able to... Inline with our bigger portfolio that we have at Dell EMC, delivering outcomes for our customers. So it's an exciting timeframe and it really reflects this idea of customers' adoption, in the technology and our investment as Dell Technologies in this software defined storage, to kind of signify to the market that we're here to stay and this is an exciting thing we're working through. The second part around this on top of kind of the rebrand is a new launch of PowerFlex three five So this new software and this software information is delivering some key additions to our portfolio, including a replication, including a new HDMI 5 GUI and including some really cool additions to our software management stack that customers are really been asking for. >> Excellent. So AC, in normal times you're out meeting with a lot of customers, I'm sure you're still talking to a lot of customers, even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic, but help us understand one of the things we know that Dell has done is it is spring line the portfolio, but when you talk about storage software-defined storage, converged, hyper-converged, there's still a few different options inside the Dell family. So tell us where PowerFlex fits and how it differentiates in position, compared to some of the other pieces. >> Yeah, great question. So, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell, which is, I am responsible for our entire portfolio of converged, hyperconverged, and software defined offerings. And really what that affords me is one particular luxury when I engage with customers. And that luxury is that I can start every single customer engagement with a question. Which is, what problem are you trying to solve? And that's really important because having a portfolio at my disposal allows me to lead with that question and really focus the conversation and solution on what their business problem is and how best to solve it. Now, the things we typically listen for when it comes to Flex are things like flexibility, things like performance, things like I'm trying to solve a platform where I want to re-platform my architecture to a software-defined outcome. But I need to run a wide variety of workloads. I need to run virtual workload, I need to run physical workload, I need to run container workload, I want to consolidate all of that onto a single modern software-defined infrastructure. Or we hear workload specific things. Things like I have an incredibly high performance Oracle Database, or I have a workload. One great example of a customer was cause of COVID they had to go from 60,000 to 160,000 remote users over a weekend. They did that on Flex with zero incremental infrastructure required for the storage. All the performance, all of the horsepower was fully capable of handling that increased capacity. Another customer, curbside pickup was a great application for their business, saw a hundred X performance requirement increase essentially over the course of a weekend because of COVID. Running on flex, they were able to swallow that performance increase with no problem. So a lot of what we see when it comes to Flex and the problems we're hearing are I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility, or I have a very acute workload problem, then I need something very scalable and very performant to solve. But again, my luxury is I can always ask the customer the question first and then leverage the power of our portfolio to provide the best solution to solve for their business problem. >> All right, so AC, appreciate you talked about scale and performance, two of the really big things, if you talk about what's happening in this space. Matt, maybe you can help us sequin through a little bit, as to how this differentiates compared to other solutions in the market place we saw software-defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure run through its wave in the last few years, you've got some very large customers, big brand names globally, as well as service providers that have used Flex in the past. So explain how this is different from others out there. >> Yeah, I think when we talk about how we manage and we work through this, it's our concepts, so I'm trying to really democratize this software to the masses, right? And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use. If you think about old or traditional software-defined storage, all the knobs and all the tweaks, sometimes it make it difficult to implement. And so you get these really high end extreme customers that leave all these knobs to tweak. We do that very, very well, but what we've been focused on the last couple of years is ensuring we can get that to multiple places through robust kind of investment in our flex manager space. So be able to automate and make things a lot easier and simpler for customers to use that way we can go down and provide this technology to more people. And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers where they need to be. And so a couple of key mechanism, which people consume our products is through our appliances and our racks or integrated racks. So when a customer comes after a kind of a full end to end white glove solution, whether I want to roll a big rack into their environment, plug it in, get it up and going, we have a full integrated rack that we deliver to the customers that really drive that outcome. And then if you think about the difference between that and the appliance the appliance has given us a little more flexibility. So if you want to plug that into an existing network or an existing environment, well, both of these things give you that extreme scale and performance that AC was just talking about, while that rich management experience. so I think you kind of aligned the consumption models and the new management, which also brings a big differentiated value to the product. >> Excellent, so, Matt when I hear you talking about these solutions, wonder if you can help connect this with how your customers are talking about cloud in general, you talked about consumption model, you talked about how to manager, so where does this fit? whether it's the Dell Tech Cloud or just your customers overall discussion of cloud. >> Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here. Typically what we see with PowerFlex is customer saying, I'm trying to achieve what we call this common platform, which is, I want to build an on premises cloud, that gives me the flexibility to run all the workloads in my data center. And when we say all the workloads, that's everything from obviously your virtualization stack through things like your physical bare metal workloads typically your high performance databases all the way through this emerging world of containers. And those containers could be virtual, could be physical. And giving customers the value of running all of that on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure, with all of the automation life cycle management to go along with it, there's really just nothing like that in the market. So really where we're seeing this adoption is customers who are saying, I want to build my own cloud within my data center, that gives me the ability to run my workloads and because I'm building them on a common infrastructure, I can build automation that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure in a very cloud-like manner. So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers really bite off on. Another approach is within that Dell Technologies cloud platform. Which is, how do we leverage the best of all of the assets under the Dell Technologies umbrella, namely assets from VMware, VMware cloud foundations and everything they offer in their multicloud story, and providing a wide variety of options within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that. Obviously we have our VxRail platform, which is the most integrated solution vertically within that VMware stack. We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio that have the ability to plug into that, PowerFlex being one of those as an option for customers to leverage within that Dell Tech Cloud platform strategy. >> Excellent. Matt, you mentioned the new updates with three dot five maybe give us a little bit more on that If whether it's an existing customer, what things they've been asking for that are in this release, or maybe first some new people that might not have looked at the Flex family for awhile that three dot five might be bringing to the table. >> Yeah, I think the great thing about this product, it's an end to end solution. So we bring all these things together that add that value. A couple of the key things is that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers is around replication or a synchronous replication. So the ability for us to be able to align that and give that to customers is probably the most important piece of this release. We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack. So if you think about other competition or other products, being able to align firmware updates for example, or software updates for example, because of the scale of our product, we've had to align real unique things in our managements like stack like the ability to do rack level updates. So really innovative, really differentiated. So customers can take racks at a time down to do updates 'cause they don't have time when there's thousands of servers in their environment, they don't have time to do one note at a time in a round robin fashion. >> And a point to add onto that, right? What's really unique and Matt touched on it, this concept of democratization. We've always done large really well with this technology, right? In a way that really no other technology platform in this space can. What the team has built on the management stack is now allowing us to also do small and medium incredibly well, where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology to the masses, to your general enterprise, to your general mid market type customer, who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of notes, but maybe solving for 10, 20 or 50 notes and delivering this very disruptive outcome that helps them much more adapt or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have, harnessing all this flexibility, but doing it with point click operations that are incredibly simple across the full stack. >> Excellent, well, we've heard from Jeff Clark when you get the power brand on there, that's a message to the customers that this is a platform that's going to be with us for quite a number of years. Give us a look forward as to both of you as to what would you expect to see from PowerFlex. >> Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right? To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap, the investment level in this technology is really high within the organization, how we work well within the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is really exciting. So we'll continue to innovate and drive this democratization story that Anthony was talking about. Innovate in new data services, innovate in new management paradigms and stacks. Like the thing I just talked about in terms of doing rack level updates. And I think just giving customers, listening to our customers and providing that on a reoccurring basis is the critical thing. So we're really embracing this idea of providing updates on a regular basis to be able to respond to customers' needs on a daily day basis. >> Yeah, I think one thing to add to that, that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on is delivering actual workload solution-based outcomes, right? Very often customers will come to us and say, here's my workload problem, right? It's an Oracle, it's a Slung, it's an elastic stack or name your workload. The team's really done a great job of leveraging this platform and building full stack validated solutions, oftentimes in tandem with the application vendor. So customers can consume this technology with complete confidence to run oftentimes their most important or critical workloads, knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor, they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider and the application provider working together to deliver this technology as an outcome. And because of its extreme flexibility, we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios and customers have responded to that incredibly well. So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing to build that solutions portfolio because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that. >> Great. I guess final question I have for you Matt, probably up your alley there, availability of the product, is it available now at the launch and if I was a VxFlex customer before what does the move to PowerFlex move, how do I get from where I was to the future If there are any hardware changes or is it all software? >> Yeah, good point. So it's available now, there on the 25th, so, really excited for the customers and we do support customers going from the existing version to the new version. And so the upgrades are pretty straight forward, pretty easy to bring in that updated management stack and then bring in the updated FlexOS. I'm sorry, PowerFlex version. (giggles) >> It's all right, I'm sure customers will be going back and forth on the terms. All right, Matt and AC thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress. (mumbles) All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (soft music)

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