>>Hi there. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John Farah, your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California in our studios for cube conversation and remotely drew showcase VP of product management at Dell technologies. This segment is about autonomous operations and moving beyond the hype into practice reality of what's going on in automation. Drew, thank you for coming on this cube conversation >>And great job. Thanks John. >>So, uh, uh, automation, autonomous operation, everyone sees the Tesla's a self-driving cars. We even heard words like self-driving store self-driving data center, self-driving cloud. It's kind of a buzz word. It's been hyped up a lot, but it's becoming much more of a reality as people start to think about how to automate a way the, the manual undifferentiated tasks and move the value into either writing better software or into operations. This is kind of a hot topic. Uh, why, why is it so hot right now? What's your take? >>Yeah, I think the answer to this lies really in the digital transformation that every company is having to embrace right now. And I use the word company, but everything I described here would apply to public entities as well. I have plenty of conversations with governments and universities and so forth. And the leverage that cost share that I've heard used before. If you're not a technology company and you don't think you need to become one, you're not going to be around for very long because every business to business, business to consumer, even consumer to consumer interaction is becoming digitized. And so, you know, making all those connections, digital based takes human talent. And that's really at the core of why this is a hot topic. You know, anybody who's going to try and hire that talent right now, or who's actively trying is going to tell you the competition is fierce. >>It's a sellers market, so to speak in terms of getting capable it talent. And so this topic of automation and autonomous operations has an incredibly pragmatic component to it because you can't hire your way through digital transformation. Uh, if you're an element of your strategy is going to have to involve making that talent more efficient. And so along with good business processes, automation is going to be a prerequisite to make any progress on your digital transformation within a finite set up of it talent. So, you know, to your question, why is it a hot topic? I, you know, look at every entities, digital transformation is going to dependent on, >>You know, you've been around, uh, seeing a lot of ways of innovation come and go. You know, every one has its own kind of like unique characteristics. Now we're seeing with this transformation, this digital transformation, a lot of things kind of coming together. So it's always been the classic people, process technologies, you know, the three kind of areas people talk about, but if you look at what cloud and now edge and distributed computing is bringing into the equation, companies are identifying competitive advantages to processes that can be software enabled or defined or automated and where their workflows are, the IP of company. So this is kind of like a new revelations. Like, I mean, Ross has always been great with your manufacturing, whatever that was in place, but now the scale of that in digital with the apps out there, this has been a big focus of the modernization of applications. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, no, no, very much so it's, um, you bring up an excellent point kind of all the focus and attention that corporations have given to these other processes for time now that you know, this, this whole, um, you know, online, digital digitize, modern operations model, if it's flowing into that as well. And you know, it's, you know, at the end of the day to, to the, some of the points that you made here, you know, are, are you and your whatever business or entity that you're supporting, you know, are you pushing out the lovers levels of features and capabilities that your internal customers or your external customers need at the pace and velocity that you need to that's, that's where competition is going to take place. That's where business is going to be won or lost. And so I think seeing an indexing of the processes around that and our customers starting to think more about that is critical. Just as much to your point, as you know, uh, you know, the, this technology strategy. Um, and, and how are you going to engage, you know, your customers through a, uh, uh, a modern, you know, digitize processes is important for the factory as the factory line for Ford motor company is in terms of how they're going to be interfacing with their customers. So, um, yeah, very, very timely. And certainly top of mind. >>Yeah. And a lot of CEO's and customers that you work with. I know you guys are having a lot of conversations. We've talked with you guys in the past, across all of Dale, actually Dell technologies, and it's the same conversation. It's distributed computing and automation, AI machine linear, all factoring in workflows becoming competitive advantage. Now we're into this autonomous phase, which is like self running or healing or all these new, new stuff. When customers think about this, and we've heard CEOs talk about strategies, don't touch the white hot core until you get to the edges first, put your toe in the water, different approaches to tackling autonomous operators. What sort of, um, strategies and results should customers expect as they go in and start jumping into the, into the, into the pool, if you will, you know, as they start, >>I'm glad you asked this question because the subject of automation gets lumped in with a lot of topics with similar, you know, buzzwords of AI and machine learning and self-healing, and self-driving while these technologies like that make autonomous operations. In reality, we run the risk of having the underlying technology, dominate the discussion, and that's not where it needs to go in, in, in my discussions with customers, they don't care if the underlying technology is machine learning or deep learning, you know, it doesn't really matter. They want to see tangible out. So, and so when we talk about the kind of results to expect, there's some pretty simple questions to ask is, you know, that I, you know, I engage with any CIO or any company, a person in an it operations capacity is, is my, is my team spending, you know, how much time is my team spending on updates or the updates taking place within tighten up windows? >>Is my team getting the root cause of issues faster? Is my team closing out tickets faster is my business deploying more applications per week, per month, per year. These are the kinds of things that really matter. I mean, this is where the rubber meets the road on this, and, you know, the way we approach this is as we deliver more capabilities and features in this space of autonomy, we're constantly engaging our customers in a before and after state to understand if we really moved the needle. And so we, we, we do collect data on this front to see if we are delivering tangible results. And you know, what we've seen just in the past year is when we do this and do it right, we're seeing issue resolution times dropping like 50 to 90%. We're seeing time spent on admin tasks reduced by like 85%. We're seeing operations cost dropped by a third, you know, applications being pushed out, almost doubling. So these are, these are the real benefits, right? If you, if you can free up and pull the human component out of some of these, you know, necessary, but not necessarily, um, you know, value added tasks, uh, in your day to day operations, this is the kind of results customers can see. >>I want to ask you about your recent event hosted by mark Hamill, but about the framework you guys announced. But before that, I want to ask you, I got your here about supply chain. I mean, honestly, Dell made, made its bones in supply chain and innovation going back to the early days, Michael's book is awesome and he talks about being successful. Um, but you started to hear words like software supply chain is starting to hear words like the word supply chain is now becoming lingua franca in business, not just on moving goods here and there. Digital supply chains are emerging and it's impacting developers because they have to secure them. And there's also mindset of an operational mindset, our systems thinking, uh, with as well as design thinking, but mainly systems thinking. So this is not for the, you know, supply chain geeks out there. This is like hitting me. And she, this notion of supply chain doesn't promise operations hit to the core of this. >>Yeah. It, um, yes, it should, because ideally what you're doing is your autonomous operations strategy is contemplating the fact that that supply chain is going to be fluid. Like, you know, and, and so, you know, just think about the, the, the, you know, the, the, the underlying infrastructure and the choices that you have being, um, on, um, on bare metal on VM, based on container-based, there's different distributions within that. We then start to think about, you know, how I might orchestrate that then the different platforms that we have there around configuration management or application orchestration, um, you're right. That supply chain does become pretty complex. And so, um, us as a, as a provider to customers that are having to do with that software supply chain, um, you, what we need to be cognizant of is the fact that, you know, we can't dictate that always, we have to assume there's going to be changes in there. And so that certainly does influence our approach and trying to make that as, um, you know, friendly to a heterogeneous environment that we know is going to change going forward. Awesome. >>And we're going to see more of that kind of thinking and apply into the people skill, skill development, and also software automation to offload that. But okay. Back to the event you guys had mark Hamill, who's, I'm a huge fan of star wars. Uh, the kid I master, um, represents the old guard, you know, let's do it now, looking at the cloud. Um, you guys announced that that event, this autonomous operations framework, could you talk about what that is and why is it important? >>Yeah, so to begin with, you know, if you had told me when I was watching mark Hamill as a child in a movie theater, that he would one day help me do my job, I would have gone insane. But anyways, um, that, that aside that, that autonomous operations framework, it's built around six levels of automation. And we can talk, take the cue from the society of automotive engineers and work that they had done around autonomous cars, but we believed that we needed something distinct for, for it. And, you know, it starts off with level zero, which is no automation, look at your there's a human doing absolutely everything. And you progress up through five subsequent levels of operator assisted, partial automation, conditional automation, level five, being full autonomy. There's a set of expectations with each of these. And look as you progress up the level of involvement of humans in the decision, and the reaction is decreased each and every step, and some might say, well, so what all you did is document a framework. >>Well, it's important to both our customers and then our internal teams that have to deliver this. And let me just elaborate on that a little bit. Why it's important to customers is that automation implies trust. As, as, as you know, you as my infrastructure provider Dell, do I trust you to automate something that is typically involved my own team, assessing what it is the problem to be and determining the remediation action. Am I willing to hand over the keys to that to you? Uh, you have to earn that and you earn that by progressing up through these different levels. And, you know, if I can't trust you with, you know, conditional automation, I'm not going to trust you with full autonomy. So the customer is, you know, there's a, there's a psychology that's involved here that they have to progress through these levels. And so you have to be deliberate, I'd say as well, you need to recognize that not all customers are going to progress through that at the same pace. >>So it's important that when we think about how we're going to provide this, yeah, we want to have an option for the highest level of autonomy as possible, but that doesn't mean all customers are going to be ready. So we need to think about, you know, how do you provide the N minus one and minus two levels of capabilities. So we're meeting customers where they are in terms of their comfort and, and embracing this idea of autonomous. And then, you know, for us internally, that's the customer's perspective for us. Then this is a, a great set of guideposts for our teams to think about how we advance. And so when we have a feature, um, that, that we're deploying and making available, let's say it's sort of a workload contention feature, right? We then think about that about, okay, how do we start to advance up through the different levels here? We know workload contention is an important problem, but how do we start to take the human out of that equation in a methodical way to advance them through these levels? So we give a suite of options to our customers to do without that. >>True. Talk to me about your reaction with customers. Cause I know there's a spectrum of customers that are leaning in, some are putting the toe in the water, so to speak somewhat more information, some are just looking at the architecture of how they're going to scale post COVID and then have a growth strategy for their business, what feedback you're getting, where are, how would you put the customer's mindset? Um, and, and can you describe the makeup of the customer profile for >>Yeah. You know, I would say, um, you know, there, you know, when we were talking about these six levels, there, there were about halfway up in general. If you, if you ask me to kind of do the bell curve, right. And in terms of comfort level, and we'll, we'll call it like partial or conditional automation there where it's like, you know, in general, it's like, okay, we, we, we know we need to take some of the humans out of this, but why don't we start by, you know, you recommending what the remediation is. I'll take a look at it and decide if I want to implement it or recommend the remediation and give me a button I can click to, to, to act upon it. So there's still some level of human checks and balances in there, but we've taken a lot of the grunt work out of it, so to speak, um, to do it. >>But that's where they are. They, they certainly aspire to move up again, back to this resource crunch, competing for talent than I can't keep hiring people to keep up with the work here and what they want to do is work with us to, okay, so how do I evolve this to start to prove it then? And this is where we can kind of go back to some of these things of the machine learning and so forth, where it's up to us as we think about how we design the systems around this is how can we start to observe how customers are responding to our recommendations? Are they always taking on, are they modifying them so we can get smarter in terms of what it is we're going to suggest and what we're just we're going to automate so that we're doing it around their values, not necessarily ours, that's a really important component here. This value based approach that we need to embrace, because, you know, you know, what, what might be considered an acceptable set of circumstances for a financial services company? You know, it might not be for a manufacturing company. And so that's something that we need to take into account in the overall design. >>Yeah. And also to your point earlier about meeting them where they are, is super important. And I think what's interesting, I've been watching over the past five Dell technology worlds, um, the tradition transition of Dell becoming much stronger and, and, and cohesive in each element of the end to end mix if you will, of hybrid. Um, and that's been a big boost. Um, and so as customers go, okay, I still got to get better. So they get, they're taking this way. And some, some customers, you know what I need to do more, but you guys are running these companies with your technology. So it's not like as easy, it's not a clean sheet of paper. In some cases, it is when you have new projects, they go cloud native and they just ended, they deploy, uh, and they have an edge and all that good stuff. But in terms of making autonomous operations real in terms of your roadmap, as you guys evolve, um, how close are you to having that secret formula? Or do you have the secret formula now? What is it? >>Yeah, so the short answer is, you know, do we have the, the, the secret sauce that we do? And, but that doesn't mean we're done like, so, so back to the framework, like nobody in the industry is at full autonomy. So let's just be really honest. There it's a, it's an aspirational north star that we, we all have to make progress to, but you know, what that means is you can take something that has a level of autonomy today. And let's take something like workload contention analysis that I brought up earlier, where, you know, we can identify where we've got workloads competing for shared resources that need to be redistributed. You know, today we flagged that contention and let the customer determine remediation. So, Hey, we're, we're letting you know you've got a problem. Um, you know, they're going to determine that remediation based upon their first hand knowledge of the environment and applying the values that they have to determine the best path, but, you know, our task is then to gain insight on that and how our customers are choosing to remediate, translate those into rule-based decisions for an explicit outcome that kind of advances you up one step, moving beyond rules. >>You start to understand more generalized outcome sot. That's a conditional automation. And then you move beyond that to get to a service level based objective, which would be high autonomy. So you're there, but this, this framework clearly calls out like this is a journey like there's no, you never really get to the end, so to speak. And that's fine, right? That, that Nirvana of full autonomy, we all should aspire to it, but we are going to be very, very deliberate in terms of how we take things like this and advance them up through the framework to make it more real. And again, give customers choice as they're willing to progress up through that trust will be there with an option for them when they, when they want to stay back with where they are, because that's where their comfort is. We'll be able to meet them there. >>Yeah. And I think also that be fair to anyone who may look at this as, you know, kind of like maybe future every, every customer you have is different operationally. I mean, you have, again, you mentioned financial FinTech, they're huge. If financial services area versus say, you know, classic enterprise, I mean, it could be insurance or whatever, a lot of legacy, and now new technologies coming in, this is all part of the, the opportunity is to kind of bring that together. Um, and it's not going to switch. >>Yeah, it is. And I'll just, you know, the one last plug for why I feel great about doing this as Dell technologies is I think about the, the breadth of what we cover in that environment, you know, with the, the breadth of our portfolio and the level of insights that we can have by kind of contemplating all the impacts across that typology that we span. Um, it's super exciting in terms of kind of what we can really unlock here in terms of value from an end date >>Drew. It's great to chat with you. I have one quick, more important question. Most important question is, did you get a selfie with mark Hamill Come on in every star wars? I mean, I'm a huge star wars fan, of course, star wars, star Trek are all on the same tier. Yeah. >>Uh, no, sorry. I missed out. I was, I was virtual for that one. So, um, although I probably could have done a screenshot on zoom or something like that and claimed it. So, but the >>Well great to have you on the queue. Thanks for your insight. I think this is a great area. Autonomous operations are moving beyond the hide, was seeing evidence in it. You seeing us the on clean sheet of paper, Greenfield opportunities, and then as it comes into the white hot core enterprise, um, even more trust is needed. Even more reliability track record you guys doing great work. Thank you so much for sharing on the cube. Great. Thank you, John. Okay. This is the cube. I'm Sean for your host for this cube conversation. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: You're on camera. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier, we are joined by Chris Kaddaras. He is the Senior Vice President Americas at Nutanix, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> Rebecca: Returning to theCUBE I should say. >> Yes, good to be back. >> So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I wanna hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting journey 'cause I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies so I started here in the Americas. You can tell by my accent, and I spent the last nine years in the AMEA business and getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world. So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're gonna get those benefits so it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past, and they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that so it's been fun. >> What accounts for this difference in mindset, you say? >> You know, I think it has to do first off with in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and when you get competition you get pressures that come with that competition. You have to evolve, you have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications, and the business needs to evolve that supports that, so that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of risk taking, a lot of transformation. A lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end-user business sooner. >> That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage Mark Hamill. The Star Wars scene, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic to target there. Everyone loves Star Wars, in fact. But I gotta ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers. Not like the other big shows, your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. You have a chance to sit down with them while they're here, what's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? >> Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. I compare our customers to almost like a religious following, I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations but it's really like that, these customers bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing. They're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational, now what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger, last year we were like five thousand, the year before that we were another two thousand less than that so it's gotten a lot bigger, and our customers are coming back and saying we want you to be a bit more intimate, okay so we've had that in the past, we've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to you development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer because that's gonna give you the true north as to where you need to go, so we're getting that feedback, some of it's hard. Some of it's you're getting too big. You're getting too dispersed, you need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey. But that's part of growing up as a company and that's the reason why we're here. To hear customer feedback. >> And you guys have that true north. Essentials, the enterprise opportunity. Multi-cloud right around the corner on top of your core business which is doing great by the way, got a great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical. Building on that core, and this product risk potential, we talked with Sunil too, the next waves are coming so customers kind of want that assurance. So I gotta ask you, when you go out there and you're selling the customers and you tell them that Nutanix is the bridge to the future, what's the value proposition, I mean obviously we touched on the enablement side. Obviously consolidation's a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that, but what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatest of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? >> I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to a customer is to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build SaaS and compute farms and how they're gonna deal with multiple hypervisors, so let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple. Develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms so let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at, let's forget about infrastructure, let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy, you pick the platform, you're locked in to the entire application set, locked in to the compute set, you're locked in to the storage set, you have no decision on hypervisor, and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications, so the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovator's dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application so that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. >> So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements. How do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? >> Yeah, it's hard, we're not doing a good job there today, just we're not. Now this is a journey of all of these companies like us, it's how do you go through that, I have the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company. Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult, so I understand what we're doing, what you do is come up with a lot of different products. A lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize, right? We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated into the core. All of those things are happening and the nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do, let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more. And then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you're fooling yourself. So that's our direction today. >> Well Chris you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers and the enterprise which is great, you don't have to worry about product leadership. You got it there, as you guys, for you in particular and your customers you're also transitioning to software. You got the full stack, that's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors, you mentioned that. We know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software which by the way is great from economics, the economics and valuations on software business are super high. >> Sure. >> So on the consumption side for customers this is gonna be something that you're gonna be involved in, you gotta bring Nutanix out to the field. You gotta roll it out for the customers. They're gonna consume Nutanix with software. How's that going, can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model, what are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transitional software? >> That's a transition we started about a year ago, and some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some real plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally so the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software and they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be so they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open and when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resale partners and all of our GSI partners it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here, what platform do you wanna consume, so that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve so moving our customers to a term based licensing model was really important. We've done that in the last year and then allowing our customers that consume very easily when you move to those terms so how do I consume a node of software? How does that work, how do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple, you know. Our previous go to market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes. It came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model it becomes a little more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELAs, what they may wanna consume have more agility around their software licensing mechanism. Get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise type purchase agreement society, I wouldn't call it ELAs because ELAs in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things about that our other competitors do around true-ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to so we wanna work with our customers and partners as to how do you wanna buy those new enterprise price purchase agreements moving forward. >> I wanna ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation you're hearing feedback from customers you're getting too big, and I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback you're getting too big, guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's the internal strategy there? >> Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right, because I see it as well, I've only been here for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now , I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, so the things that we're gonna do are a few things. We do have a customer advisory board that meets, right now it only meets once a year in certain markets and we need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voices back into what we're doing, we got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week, big customers that said you need to think about this and it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, we also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right, so our sales reps, our Ses, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day. Out support people, providing that vehicle of feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important, so we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today but we're not getting the message through. They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're gonna start to create and develop that within the company. >> So, growing pains, you have to fix those things. Software model, looking good, so things are clicking right now, net promoter score in the 90s which is pretty much unheard of. You have a great, loyal customer base. Good news there? >> Yeah, I mean great news, we're talking about first world problems here, right? We have a huge market, the market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how we take our fair share and more of that marketplace so these are the discussion that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Any other country >> Well, you're Chris, you're in sales, you're running all the fields. Sales and you guys got a humble culture with a heart, as Dheeraj talked about. You gotta be aggressive, you gotta be competitive, and you gotta go win those deals. You gotta win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah, and it's really from our perspective it's turned a bit into a two horse race at this point in time, we think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace for customers who want flexibility and choice. I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time. Our competitors are strong, and they're good. They're good people, they work hard, they have great people and great technologies. Our entire value proposition around how to provide customers flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in their future and I think if we do that then we'll be in a good place. >> Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years knowing the competition, who could out-muscle you if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just be faster and innovate. >> Yeah, I think we're doing that on technology. We're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean coming out with an amazing product. Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid market company to an enterprise company to a global account company. These things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, it's a scaling problem and those are things that we can easily do. I'm happy to do those and those are things that we are hiring new people that help us through that journey and it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of positive results for our customers. >> Exciting times, well Chris Kaddaras thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT, 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host John Furrier. Here we are, we're at day two, John, this conference, I gotta say it's pretty cool. 6500 people, we're steps away from Disneyland, and, you go to a lot of these things every year. I also do about a dozen or so for theCUBE. So in other words, we're veterans of this kind of thing. This does seem to have a different vibe and I think it really gets to the kind of company Nutanix is, and where it is in its journey. >> Nutanix is still a small company even though they're 10 years old, as Dheeraj talks about. The numbers aren't massive, I mean, we go to a lot of other shows where it's 15,000, Amazon Web Services just had an event in London, Dave Vellante was out there covering, Stu was covering Red Hat summit in Boston this week, tons of events going on. Amazon Web Services' summit in comparison was 12,500 people, 22,000 registered, that's a summit in London. It's not the re:Invent main conferences like 30,000 people. And that's always sold out, so they got a lot, in terms of attendees numbers they're still in the entry level, mid range growth. But I think that's okay, they like that culture and I think the story here at this show is intimacy, they would rather err on the side of better content and more intimate opportunities for their customers to really get the straight scoop. And I think it's less of a conference slash trade show, more of an intimate relationships where they can provide feedback, for customers to give feedback, and for Nutanix to figure out with the customers how to connect to them. So, I think the story here is, Nutanix is growing up as a company, they're 10 years old and they gotta go the next level and the management team has technical chops, and they have a long term view. They have that 20 mile stare, they can see out and they're trying to figure it out. I still think that the numbers are light on their forecast I still think that there's some sandbagging going on there, I'm not saying they're sandbagging, but I mean, I think, you look at Essentials, which is the enterprise and then multi-cloud, the numbers that we're seeing at Wikibon are much bigger, and Amazon reflects that. So I think they're being cautious but smart about how they execute off their success they've had in the first 10 years to go the next 10 to 20 years and I think that's clear in the management team, that they wanna build a durable company. >> Well exactly, and I think that that's what's really coming through, is that this is, as you said, they're growing up. This is a real coming of age moment for them, they've celebrated the 10 years. Okay, so what kind of company are we? Who do we want to be? And what's coming through is that from the technology side, they get it. They say, I'm sort of reminded of the Henry David Thoreau quote, our life is frittered away by detail, simplify simplify simplify, that's what customers want. They want this one click data recovery, they want their credentials to be assumed. You know who I am, I'm safe to be in here. Fixing things, dealing with that. So I think that they get that, that simplicity is key. They also get customer service. I mean their Net Promoter scores, as we've noted, are in the 90s, that's just unheard of. >> It's monster, monster numbers. >> It really is and so they get it. We need to be responsive to customers, we need to have a personal relationship with these, because it's not just organizations, it's people at the other end of these transactions. >> I mean, I think Nutanix, one of the stories that's popping out in the hallways as I walk around and talk to customers and people and the company and partners, is that Nutanix has a lot of headroom in their growth. I think Wall Street is interesting and you heard Dheeraj talk about that yesterday, about having a new customer, you asked him about his management style and he said quote, I have a new customer called Wall Street. And I have to balance that against mainstream enterprise which is his core business. And so he as a CEO and the company are dealing with this new stakeholder called public company customer retail stock buyers. That's a short term cycle and I think, if you look at their stock, they had a big knife edge drop in the past quarter. And I think the shorts are circling, it's a whole nother dynamic, it's a whole nother theater for Nutanix to deal with, and I think that's something that they gotta get used to. And he was clear, he said I'm addressing it, we're gonna balance it, but they gotta be thinking long term because this company has a lot more to do and their customer base are risk takers. Because everyone we talk to has this different style or persona. They're smart, they're usually engineering oriented, they love engineered solutions. And they're taking chances. And everyone who's taken the chance with Nutanix, has paid off. That seems to be the theme. And as we were talking before we came on camera, Mark Hamill, Jedi knight, you know, Star Wars, was on stage giving the keynote, their customer base, is a lot like the Jedi order, right? I mean they see themselves as, elite, technically, they're not afraid to take organizational risks and push that DevOps culture. And we heard that from Sunil, the chief product officer that they're really looking at, this new way to do things, like they did with hyperconvergence, they pioneered that, set the table on that and foundationally built that. They wanna take that same playbook of HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, and apply it to the cloud. And provide an abstraction layer advantage and I think that is clearly their strategy and that's, to me, the top story here. >> I couldn't agree more and I also think that, what is also coming through is this idea of we don't wanna be safe. What's clear is that, consumer technologies have leapfrogged IT enterprise vendors. The things that we hold in our pockets are so much more sophisticated than what businesses and organizations, multi-billion dollar businesses and organizations, are using, what their employees are using on a day to day basis. So we expect a certain kind of design and ease of use, in our personal lives and they're bringing it to enterprises and think that that is really what's exciting and interesting about this company. >> What's interesting about their story is that, the consistent theme about the customers is that it's kind of a consolidation story but that's not the real story because back in the old days of IT, consolidation was the strategy. Consolidate vendors, consolidate footprint to reduce cost, clearly a cost reduction. With Nutanix what they get is they get consolidation, and they enable advantages so the real value of Nutanix is to be positioned for those new kinds of app developers, so. This is like, you get consolidation as a side benefit for enabling the value, and that's the theme that's coming out of all the customer testimonials and interviews is, we gotta do more, we gotta create more enablement for the app developers and we gotta provide more performant storage servers and software for the customers. And that's their main focus and they consolidation as a benefit. That's gonna scare a lot of people and customers that I've talked to said, hey I got all the stuff but I can't just throw it away tomorrow, I gotta move it out over time, so, this is the Nutanix sales challenge, how do you move faster with all that incumbent, legacy stuff in these datacenters, while enabling the multi-cloud capability? >> And we're gonna be talking about that more today with Chris Kaddaras on the show. We have a lot of great guests, we have the CIO, Wendy Pfeiffer, I was reading an article about her today, she answered an ad as a teenager to work for NASA. She had an idea for NASA and so we're gonna hear much more about her story, we've got a lot of great guests. >> Well what's your take? I mean, you've been here, you're getting immersed in. What's your take of the show, what's your analysis? >> Well, what's really interesting to me is that we're having this conversation against this backdrop where, the technology industry is really under fire. I mean, we heard Ayanna Howard here on the show yesterday and then she was up on the main stage today, talking about the good, the bad, and then the really scary elements of AI and how it really has these powers that can do a lot of wonderful things and help children with special needs and help workers be more productive and engaged and collaborate. But yet, there's also this much darker side that AI's really only as good as its creators. And then the other difficulty is that, because we have become so trusting of these machines, we disregard our own intuition. And that is a really scary element, so. What I think is exciting, and it goes back to this risk taking mentality, that Nutanix has, is, we're gonna talk about these things. We're just going to forget about them or they're gonna be a sideshow, this is really on the main stage, let's talk about our values, let's talk about the humanity of technology and this is really an important part of the conversation. >> It's interesting, the culture, we talked about the culture a lot yesterday. And you can see from the mix of the guests we've had here and how they're putting their content together across the show portfolio, it's not just speeds and feeds. There's a lot of tech for good angle but they're not tech for good stories like hey, look, here's a tech for good story. Look how good we are because we promote it. They're authentic people that have a great story that has a tech involvement. But it's not a pure Nutanix messaging kind of thing. >> Right, and it goes to back to their values, the humble, hungry, honest, and have a lot of heart. I mean I think that that is, you really see how important culture is, when it is top down. When Dheeraj embodies certain characteristics and traits, you see that employees then look up and they say okay, this is what we're about, this is who we are. >> You know, we also talked yesterday about our analysis in the keynote, what's interesting about culture is, there's also a culture shift going on inside their customer base. And again, it's back to this kind of Star Wars theme, Jedi knights and the revolution continuing for Nutanix, their opportunity is to continue to stay on the course, and this is gonna be a big bet for them, they gotta make some big bets on the technology side, which they're making, but also they have an opportunity because a lot of their installed base are rebels, right? So you have this rebellion IT guy, generational shift where you have DevOps coming in and Gene Kim who wrote the book on DevOps, runs the biggest DevOps event in the world, series of events, DevOps Enterprise Summit, he's even saying it's about 3% changeover. So I think there's a big tailwind coming for Nutanix. Around DevOps, operating models, in the enterprise and cloud where, the convergence of those two worlds coming together, and it's gonna be a younger generation, it's gonna be a different world. If that happens, I think that's gonna be something that Wall Street might not see. I think that's kind of an area. And that's gonna be a good tailwind for Nutanix. The other notable thing that I would point out from this show is, the presence of VMware visibly in the conversation. And I think Dheeraj was talking about, hey we don't mind talking about VMware because they validate the marketplace, they're the big 800 pound gorilla. And we're gonna continue to innovate around them. We don't need their Hypervisor, customers don't need to pay their vTax, that's his messaging, so that was a key notable. The other one was the challenge that Nutanix has, this is, again, might be a Wall Street insight for some of the Wall Street folks out there is that, their challenge has been getting new logos. Their cost to sales is a little bit high because they require POCs and once they get in there they usually win. And then their cost per sales, cost per order dollar on the sales side once they have a customer, is very low, they get more renewals and they have more net contract value so they have great customer economics on that side. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal for them, could bring them a tsunami of new logos. That could give them a lot of leverage and bring their customer base well above their 12,000 number now. And bring them up into a whole nother level. So I think the HPE deal will be a tell sign on the numbers, and if they can get more new logos in there, the big accounts that HP has through their channel, that's a big story. So VMware, HPE, culture, all the main story here. >> And of course we had HPE on the show yesterday, talking about that very development, so. We have lots more great content, great guests to come today, this has been just a ball hosting with you, so I'm really for another day. >> Very intimate show, I mean, Nutanix are a very intimate show they don't really care about the big numbers, they want the right numbers and that speaks to their culture. >> And they know their people. Because as we talked about many times, Mark Hamill, up on the stage yesterday, so, they know their community. Please stay tuned for more of the coverage from theCUBE of .NEXT here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)