(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's the CUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside, Stew Miniman. We're joined by Monica Kumar, she is the SVP product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube. >> Sure, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So the last time we met, we were in Anaheim at the last big Nutanix conference and you were fresh into the job, six weeks in, you (laughs) and now you're seven months in, this is after a 22 year career at Oracle. >> Yes >> So you're a tech veteran, but tell us a little bit about how it's going, what you've seen so far, why the opportunity appeal and if it's living up to what your expectations were. It's been an absolute adventure at Nutanix. It's been, actually it's going to be close to eight months now and it was a bit scary for me to take the plunge after 26 years in the tech industry, I've had a fulfilling career. But there was a, actually couple reasons why Nutanix was so appealing to me and it's been a fantastic ride so far. One was, this intense focus on providing technology that's so innovative, that it's geared to simplifying IT's live, and geared to its business outcomes. But there's a bigger goal for Nutanix, which really drew me to the company, which is this obsession with customer delight and providing outstanding customer experience. So here I am, almost eight months later, I'm living it, in the Nutanix world and hoping we're delighting customers as well as we go along. >> Monica, it's a very much a different company. I look at Oracle and Nutanix. Many of the Nutanix executives and team have background in Oracle, you know, Oracle, Software at its heart, and helped deliver one of the stickiest applications in Enterprise as well as a role in IT, I mean the DBA is there. Lot of discussion here at the show here about moving from the discussion of HyperConverge to HyperCloud. Give us your thought as to where you see your customers, today, kind of the state of the industry, and where you see Nutanix fitting in going beyond Hyperconverge into the broader Cloud discussion. >> Yeah I think that's a great question to set up the context. If I think about companies like Oracle, Nutanix, and some of the larger software companies that been around for a while, there's a lot of commonality, I think, between them, right. One is catering to enterprise customers, so even the Nutanix is only 10 years old, I was surprised as to how many big global 2000 companies, big brands actually use Nutanix today. So we've actually almost been born in the enterprise and now we expanding out to the commercial space. So by that what I mean is, when you're born in the enterprise, you know how important data centers are to our customers. They've invested huge amounts, in some cases billions of dollars to create these fully functional data centers that are hosting all the applications and data and all the business critical databases in the data center. And now, they're trying to figure out how do they bring agility and flexibility and speed while preserving all this investment made in the data centers. So I think from that perspective, we very much understand it's about helping our customers who've built big data centers on premises to bring Cloud agility to those customers, whether it's on premises or in public Cloud, and actually the combination of both is where hybrid comes in. >> So what is the status of things, in terms of where are most companies at right now, would you say. >> Yeah, interestingly, we've run a number of surveys and in 2018 when we ran the survey around HybridCloud, 86 percent of the survey respondents said that's the IT model they would prefer because they can exponentially enhance the computing resources, they can actually without investing money in wheeling in servers and storage and space and pulling, they can actually advance and expand the stack where they can deploy applications, right. So it's the most preferred IT model, however, there's lots of issues in making it a reality. And I think we can talk about that. Almost 70 percent said they would love to make it a preferred model, but they are unable to deploy it because of multiple reasons. >> Yeah, it's interesting when I think of what I've heard from customers for years and years, you go talk to IT and they say, "I don't have enough headcount, I don't have enough money," "I can't keep up." Yet, some of the new deployment models, Oh my gosh, you're going to put me out of a job, you know, I won't be able to do anything it's like, wait I thought you didn't have time to do any of the things you want to do and didn't have enough money. If we could make it easier, if some of the pieces could be invisible or just handled, you could go work on all of those other projects that you've been wanting to. How is Nutanix helping customers through kind of that transition to, as you said, they want agility, they want choice, they need to be able to have IT be a participant with, if not a driver for the business. >> Yes, you know, if you think about in the last decade, IT has been very focused on infrastructure modernization or what we call data center modernization. So whatever we have, we want to make it simple, cut costs so it's most efficient, and I think that's a great initiative to embark on, but it's almost very inside, inward-centric. It's about how do I make my life easy, make myself more productive, cut costs in my work. I think if we turn it around to customer delight and IT wanted to delight the customers, and really focus on becoming a service organization, that's when things start changing because now we are talking about consumerization of IT. In our lives, we all are so used to delight, our smartphone response as soon as we click something or swipe something, we get the answers. There're lots of things in life that have changed where it's instant gratification in a way, and I think companies are also asking and demanding that of IT. It's like hey if I want IT resources, I want it right away. So I think IT as an organization is changing and really focusing more on becoming a service organization and delighting their customers and that's where automation comes in. That's where cutting down all the manual tasks, which a machine or a robot or software can do, so the human being can focus on what's more important to them, what's more strategic, and I think that's where having and choosing the right platform comes in, so that IT can provide more resilient services and really provide services at the speed the business is demanding. So to me, I think that's where companies like Nutanix come in, where we can help IT become that service organization. >> So when you're talking about this evolution of IT, I mean, what does that mean for the skills that become the in-demand skills, what does that mean for how IT is placed within an organization and how it interacts with other functions, I mean how does this change really manifest itself. >> Yeah, and I think to your point as well too, I think IT has to become a change agent, no longer can IT just be in a supporting role and just help advance the business because I think now businesses are realizing that if they don't delight customers, they can't really grow. They won't stay competitive, so IT has to become the change agent to use technology to advance and grow the business, and I think from that perspective, if you look at IT admins, Cis admins, storage admins, data administrators, all of them need to start thinking about what is the next level of skillset, which makes me become more of a dev-ops or a data-ops person, or an IT-ops person. As it was to simply just administering something, simply badgering provisioning is not good enough anymore. There needs to be some element of programming, some element of continuous delivery and some element of bridging the gap between a public and private cloud solution, where apps can run on both places, where data can be in both places. So we do want the IT skillsets to evolve in a way that they can become more cloud engineers in my opinion, as opposed to staying administrators. >> Yeah, Monica, I had a great discussion with a customer earlier in the show, and he said that customers what we used to do in IT is follow the rules and what I don't want you doing in the future is following the rules, I want you to try things, I want you to try to break things and they felt that Nutanix was a platform that enabled them to be able to do that. >> Yes, absolutely, I think IT is in such a powerful position today to drive change, and really by uplevelling the skills, the IT administrators would realize they become more strategic to the organization but they even have better job prospects for themselves like individually right. I think they can do so much better in their career as well. >> Yeah, there's the great line that the executives say: what if we train our people up on new stuff and they leave, and the response is what if we don't and they stay. (laughs) >> Yes, I totally agree. >> The danger. So in terms of this evolution of IT as a functional unit in an organization and also as a human being who just works in the industry. We're talking about all these changes. How is it also changing the way organizations work? Do you know what I'm saying, in the sense of how is this evolution of IT driving change in the workplace. >> Absolutely, I think some of the old sidewalls are breaking. Just let's use Nutanix as an example when we first came out with a hybrid on which infrastructure solution, we broke the sidewalls between compute storage and virtualization. You know there was >> Altogether now. >> Yeah, exactly all together now, exactly. So there was either sys-admin, storage admins, already with using hybrid conversions, they started to work together. Now more-so, as dev-ops becomes, like I said you know, it's dev-ops , AI-ops, IT-ops, data-ops, I think we're going to start to seeing the organizations merging almost, right, and maybe there won't be a need for having a separate DBA versus a separate storage admin, versus a separate sys-admin. Maybe we are going to a place where it's going to be dev-ops or some ops, you know, all ops. That organization that's going to help create the platform for apps and data working together because the technology will be so seamless and so simple to actually use that they can focus on the process that they need to create with the organization to deploy the technology and benefit from it. >> Monica, since you've now been at the company almost eight months, I'm wondering if there's anything now being on the inside that you've learned that you'd say, Gee I wish more people on the outside understood this about Nutanix. >> Yes, absolutely I think the one thing which I knew coming in, but you don't really realize it 'till you actually realize it, and you internalize it, it really is the intense focus we have on customer success. I mean we live and breathe by that, every single person from executive level down and I give you a very small example. About two months ago, I got an email, this random email from somebody saying, "Hey I just bought Nutanix" "last week and I'm having some issue" "and I just saw you joined Nutanix, you know," "I want to reach out to you." At first, I thought hm, but I responded and I said, "Well I'm glad you reached out to me." "Is there anybody you're working with at Nutanix?" And turns out he was working with some channel partners and somebody he gave me a name. Within 24 hours, we had done enough trouble-shooting and trying to figure out what the problem was. I reached back out to him saying, you can get the part that you need, and within 48 hours he had a spot and he emailed me saying, "Thank you so much", and by the way this was a really small customer in terms of the size of the opportunity that we had, but it doesn't matter to us. Every customer counts, and every customer's success is paramount to us. >> So all hands on deck kind of base-- >> It is all hands on deck kind of thing, yep, so I can say, to me, even though I knew going into it that that's a Big Four philosophy, but to live it, it's a totally different level. >> Great, well Monica thank you so much and congrats on the new job. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stew Miniman, stay tuned on more of the Cube's live coverage of .Next. (techno music)