>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual Experience Brought to you by HP >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover Virtual experience. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the Palo Alto studio with remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HBO. ET Al is tailor vice president of content innovation with studio lab Disney. And so men do suck. Sarkar, distinguished technologist, director of AI at HP. Thanks for coming on, Alice. Someone do. Thank you for taking the time. >>It's great to be here. Hi, >>I love this story. I think it's the innovation story, and I think it's going to be one that will experience in our life going forward. That is media, video and experiences and this innovation in AI. It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney Studio Labs Alice that you're running and it's super super important and fun as well. Very relevant. Cool. So first, before we get started, Alice, >>take a minute >>to explain a little about yourself and how Studio Lab came about. Yeah, >>McGuinness Studio lab is just over in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say, three years ago and at the time, just previously before that I had a start up company that came through the Disney accelerators. So I was already inside the building and, um, the team there said Felicity on the said, You know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology, and that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said Yes on then. Since then, we'll be going a team. We opened the lab in May of 2018 and here we are in the middle of Pandemic. But it has grown like crazy. Its just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >>and it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get some of that talk about your experiences, and I wonder how you got into this position because you came in as an entrepreneur. You're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >>Yeah, Okay, well, so as you could sell on British. My actual background started. My whole career started in technology in the mid nineties. A Xai started as a training video editor but then switched very quickly and 95 building websites. And from there on, it was Internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling. And, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So those five years of the BBC in there already department and, um actually out here is VP of digital media for them and then Channel four as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yep, flights side story and doing a startup which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for Children. And then I came round. Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to you make films and episodic content. Even Mawr. You name it faster, better, more exciting. Using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it, >>and the lab that you're doing is it's an accelerant, almost four new technologies. Your job is to what? Look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out what's next. It's >>not a structure. I think you have >>some rain to be creative and experiment >>Well, yeah, I mean, in fact. So it's a studio live at the studios. We'll Disney has eight studios at the moment, and what we do is we look at actually the whole breath of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world and we segregate those that that whole breadth from into three categories i d. Eight. When you know the process of generating the idea and building it, make how we make it where we make it, what we make it with on that experience, how we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole SNU of projects. The studio level so works with some of the best technology companies in the world, and we call those are innovation partners on. We sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call superpowers to the system we like to think. But the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney. You know, in this case, for instance, working with HP like produces something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HP. He couldn't necessarily do it on his own, either. So, yeah, it's a huge remit, and we tend to look, we don't look quite so far out. Generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigated then and get a bit of a head start. >>Well, it's great. Have HBs partner and And having that bench of technology software people is just a nice power source for you as well. Someone to talk about the relation HP relationship with Disney because, um, you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role? You guys sitting around you riff and put a white board together and say, Hey, we're gonna solve these big problems. Here is the future of consumption. That is the future of video. What goes on? Tell us your the relationship between you guys. >>Yeah, it's a good question at HP. We don't really make the service, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the artificial intelligence solutions and algorithms on the DP use and scale it across servers. So So you don't have this opportunity came up from Disney, where this thing came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As as, you know, there are a lot of blemishes and in the video that can come up and didn't want to fix all of them. And they have great algorithm. But what happens is, but with better guards comes a huge amount of computational complexity, which needs a little bit of heterogeneous compute input in parallel processing and in sequential processing. So we thought that it's a perfect on, and it's a combination off the skill sets to make this video quality software execute at speed switch needed for production. Disney. >>So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to. You guys have a great technology. We hear a lot more from the execs at HB on our reporting else. Want to get your thoughts? We're covering some of this new edge technologies. We're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago, called The New Creative Class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cell phone and and really set of Asti studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how Studio Lab collaborates with filmmakers and execs to push the push, the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh? Because the sign of the times, our instagram, tic tac, this is just very elementary. The quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine in, but you can almost imagine the range of quality that's going to come so access to more people, certainly more equipment, cameras, etcetera. What's next? How do you guys see? What's some examples can you share? >>It's an amazing question. I mean, we're working on films and episodic. It's rather than very short form content, obviously, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads first using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability Teoh generate vertical metric models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then use it getting that data into a three D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme. What we want to do is like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions aren't having to slog through something that's slow and tedious. They want to get to the story, telling the art in the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for their QC process toe finished is what we want to kind of get rid of so they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster and just going back to what Mandy was saying about the AI project here I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on screen when we do our finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans at their best historically have been the best of finding dead pixels. But what a job I have to do at the end of the process to go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print. Right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks follows automatically. And then HP came in and spread that whole process up by nine X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prince. >>You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology. Even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe them because mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster taking with ah, heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand when it's creative writing software. This is kind of a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still like software is kind of same thing, almost so you know, when you see these new technologies that love to get both your reactions of this. One of the big misses that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. And we're kind of seeing that now. A covert our ones. From a way, I could have seen this. No, no one predicted. So what's >>an >>example of something that people might be misunderstanding that super relevant, that that might become super important very quickly? Any thoughts? >>That's great. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then coming, potentially gone. Except it hasn't it's VR. So it came, you know, whenever it was 20 years ago, and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world And then it reappeared again six years ago again, everybody said it's going to change the world, and in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed, I think, because out in the market everyone is expecting VR to have being a huge consumer success, and I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, we're using VR on a daily basis in film production. Virtual production is one of the biggest, um, emerging processes that is happening If you've seen anything to do with, um Jungle Book Line King Man DeLorean. Anything the industrial like magic work on. You're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on screen, and it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm gonna have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. Ai and Ml is a huge area, obviously were scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to say that it's going to come and go in this one. This is huge, but we're only just beginning to see where and how we can apply Ai and Ml and you did you wanna jump in on that one? So >>let me take it from the technology standpoint, I think it was also very cool trends. Now what happens is that your ML spaces people have come up with creative ideas. But one of the biggest challenge is how do you take those ideas for commercial, use it on and make and make it work at the speed, as Alice was mentioning, It makes it feasible in production. So accelerating your ML on making it in a form which is visible is super important. And the other aspect of it is just the first video quality that it was mentioning. That picture is one types, and I know the business is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes. But there's a whole variety of these vanishes on with human operators. It's kind of impossible to scale up the production on to find all these different artifacts like, you know, especially now. As you can see, the video is disseminated in your forms in your ipads from like, you know, in that streaming. So this is a problem of scale on do stuff. This is also like, you know, a lot of compute on a very like I said, a lot of collaboration with complimentary skill sets that make it real. >>I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employees, now retired good friend, and we're talking about all the Dev ops agile go fast scale up, and he made a comment I want to get your reaction to, he said. You know what we're missing is craft and software. You speak crafts game. So when you have speed, you lose craft, and we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterating. Then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies where you can kind of build crafting into it. Alice, what's your reaction to that? >>One of our favorite anecdotes from The Lion King is so Jon Favreau, the director, built out the virtual production system himself, Teoh with his team to make the film, and it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shortened the time to make the film. What the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time, so effectively John had more takes and more material to make his final film with, and that that's what we want people to have. We want them to have to know ever to have to say I missed my perfect shot because of I don't know what you know. We run out of time so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it. That's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material is possible in the most efficient way. Basically, at the end of the day, for our for our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >>So someone do. This is an example of the pixel innovation. The Video QC. It's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it. You can automate that respect from the tech trends. Will automation action in there? >>Yeah, absolutely. And as Chris was mentioning, If you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization, then you have solved the problem that the people who are creative can think on implement something in a very short time, gone back for like, you know, some of these I'm just coming. >>Well, it's a very impressed that I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work. You guys are in the heart of Burbank and all the action and the Euro little incubates really kind of R and D meets commercial commercially. Really cool. But I have to ask you, with covert 19 going on, how are you guys handling? The situation certainly impacted people coming to work. How is your team? Have been impacted. And how are you guys continuing the mission? >>Well, yeah, The lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building, but it's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all. The team carried on the next day from home, and in fact, we have expanded even because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work work remotely. You know, you name it folks with that home connections, wondering if we had some five G phones hanging around that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on in not least, cause it was just around. This kind of what this has done has accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly in the beginning of remote teller work and remote telepresence and then also ideas coming out of that. So ah, you know, again, the other day I heard holograms coming up. Like, Can we have holograms yet? So we don't do it That's going to cover out again. Yeah, but you know what? The team have all been amazing, would. But we'll miss each other. You know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology >>has been a great leader in in accumulating. All HP employees work from removed and in the process. But we're also discovered is we have also, you know, maybe so. We discovered innovative ways where we can still work together. Like so we increase the volume of our virtual collaborations on. I worked with Erica from Disney is a tremendous facilitator and the technologists of mining one. You have this close collaboration going. Andi almost missed nothing, but yes, if you would like to, you know, on the field each other on to be in close proximity. Look at each app in each other's eyes are probably that's only missing thing, but rest off it, You know, we created an environment perfect, clever and work pretty well. And actually, at this point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote, considering the community of Silicon Valley. >>You know, the final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technology that you're excited about. But someone doing you know, we're talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around you know what virtualization server virtualization has done? An HP knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business that created cloud because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers. But I think this covert 19 and future beyond it virtualization of life, Immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlight a few of them. Um, this virtualization of life society experiences playing work. It's not just work. It's experiences so Internet of things devices how I'm consuming how I'm producing. It's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your both of your thoughts on this kind of virtualization of life because certainly impact studio lab, because you think about these things. Alice and HP has to invent that the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >>Well, goodness, may, I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do video conferencing that you don't have the same subtle cues as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like we are on day similar and not going to solve that immediately. So what we'll have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think, though fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips. And then what's missing? We're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out as people understand this new paradigm and what they could do to solve for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back to back nine hours of BTC a day. And by the end of the day, I could barely walk Way gonna do about that. I think we're gonna see holograms like that. We're gonna see home exercise equipment combined. You know, really good ones. Like you've seen politicians shares going crazy. There's tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually being held back by, um other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like we have to fix this problem. >>Well, you've got a great job. I want to come to quit. My job income joined studio left. Sounds like it's a playground of fun. There great stuff. Someone do close us out here. What? Are you excited about as we virtualized you're in the in the labs, creating new technology. You're distinct, technologist and director of AI. When you're on the cutting edge, you're riding the wave two. What's your take on this? >>Virtually? Yeah, you know the experience. What it has done is it has pushed the age to the home. So now if you really see home is one of the principal connectivity to the outside world restaurants. Professional goes on and on with that, What I also offers is like a better experience. Right now. We're all gather about Zoom being able to do a video conferencing. But as this was pointing out there is that here in that we are now consider combining the augmented reality and and the way that we do your conference and all the other innovations that we could begin in the East so that the interactions becomes much more really. And that is like, you know, I'd say that the world is moving to >>l Cool. Thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoyed. Congratulations on studio lab. You've got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. And someone do. Thank you very much for sharing the insights on HP's role in that. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the Cube. Virtual covering HP Discover virtual experience. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Stay tuned for more coverage from HP Discover experience after this break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.

>>live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the Q covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Okay, Welcome back, everyone. To the Bella Centre in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are kicking off day two of the cubes live coverage of dot Next Nutanix the Nutanix show dot Next I'm your host, Rebecca night sitting alongside stew. Minutemen, of course, Do. The word of the day is delight. And in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is a year after your voted the most happy, the happiest country, the country that coined the term Hugh Ge, which means a sense of well being. What do you think delight It means in the context of this show in particular. >>Yeah, Rebecca. Right yesterday I thought I only knew one word. Ivan tackle. It was, Thank you, of course, but Hugh GE is actually one I I'd read about cause it's interesting. The study of happiness. They actually have an institute here in Denmark on talk about it. As you said, the people are some of the happiest. You say, Wow, it's, you know, often cold and rainy and things like that. But they do look into the study of delight, and it's it's something that I find pretty fascinating. I read a book by Tony Shea, who's the founder and CEO of Zappos talked about. You know, we all talk about where you want to go in career and what you want to do. But you know, how do we actually understand happiness and bringing it to the Tannic Show? Definitely. There is a certain joy from the community here. We've had a lot of talk with some of the practitioners as well as some of Nutanix employees, they want to say customer focused. They wantto, you know, build these experiences as the CEO Dheeraj Pandey said. And therefore, it's not about that that product, because so much in technology it's that new, shiny thing that we understand. Oh, it's never a silver bullet, and there's always the repercussions. And how do I have to reorganize? Things change so fast and technology. But if I could have experienced with the example get used all the time, is you know what would transform when we move to you know, the smartphone revolutionized by the iPhone or so many other things that just pull together, that that simplicity that gets baked in the design, something we've talked about both, You know, in Denmark as well as from the Nutanix discussion s o. So pulling those pieces together kind of a left brain right brain all pulling together. It has been interesting. And yeah, it gives kind of a highlight as to why Copenhagen was a nice place. Definitely. We've enjoyed, you know, being here at the show. >>Absolutely. And I think you're you're you're you're right on or we'll be talking a lot about designed today because delight is one of those again. It's something ineffable quality. You don't know you're being delighted because you're just being delighted. It's just nice at the ease of use. And in Monica Kumar, who we had on the show yesterday, of course, was talking about all all of the elements that go into that, taking 10 clicks and making enemies e swipe, eliminating downtime just a kn easy, intuitive use, which is which is absolutely what goes into delighting customers. We're gonna have a teacher. I'm a Chandran on the show today, talking Maura about designed to, uh, tell me about the energy of the show. We're gonna get into Nutanix a bit more today too. But just what do you think about the energy? Ah, what what you're feeling. >>So there are certain shows that we go to where we know that you have the true believers at the show. Splunk sw dot com is one where they all love the geeky T shirts that they get and people enjoy their service. Now, another one. A lot of the software companies it transformed the way they think. And then then they work. S O. You know, Dave wanted for years would tell me about that community community I know. Well, the VM world community. This reminds me of earlier days in VM World VM wear, you know, is dominant in their space. But, >>you know, >>they're shows. Not exactly. You know, a There are parties and their friends that we get together and one of the best communities in the industry. But, you know, it's a much, much bigger company. When you're 60,000 people and things like that, there's not as much of the kind of smaller, you know, touch and feel. You know, we heard from Monica yesterday. She talked about right when she joined the company. You know, somebody she knew would reached out about an issue that need to be worked out and just seamless, all swarming to solve that issue. Something, you know, I've done it. Some companies I've worked out where you know what teams pulling for. You know, the customer comes first and you get things done. So the customers here definitely are highly engaged, very excited because the experience of using the solution has made their lives easier and transfer help them transform their business. You know, that goal of I t helping toe not only support but be a driver of the business is exciting. >>So So exactly. And this is what we're gonna be talking about today to new tenants. They have this passionate customer base which they will need as they are a maturing company. So not now They're 10. They're hitting their their tween age years. So talk a little bit about what you're seeing about Nutanix trajectory and what it needs to do to to hit those next steps. >>S o. You know, the discussion for the last two years has been the move from removing hardware for something that they sold, which was always it was the software that was important and changes really passed along the hardware to this move to subscription, and along with that, it isn't just the same core a OS Nutanix software and some of the pieces that go with it. But really, they're expanding beyond infrastructure software to some of the application software. So yesterday we had Nikola, who's the CEO of Frame Frame, is desktop as a service S O. That was the type of software that sat on top of Nutanix or on top of the cloud expanding in that market. We're going have Bala on today to talk about ERA its database database absolutely an application that's that on Nutanix. But now they're building some of these applications. It's interesting. Almost 10 years ago, VM where tried to get into the application space they bought an email company they bought a social company on. Really, that didn't pan out well for them. Amazon does not sell many of their. They sell some of their own application, but most of them are an open source solution that is then delivered as opposed to the building applications. On top of a building applications is that the realm of Oracle on Microsoft and IBM have these, so it positions Nutanix in it in a little bit of different space. And how much are they going to have the customers that bought the platform that will build the service's leverage? The service is on top of them versus how many customers will come to them because of that application. Say, Oh, well, you know, database is one of those challenging things. If I could just have a nice, simple solution and maybe that's in the cloud. Or maybe it is on, you know, Nutanix environment in their data center on their server of choice. You know there are some Pastor Newtown is going forward to a much broader tam, but it's much broader competition, too, and you know their sales force and there's go to market their there's partners we're gonna spend a little time talking about, like the systems integrators today s Oh, it is a big, vast sea out there in the I T World. Nutanix has carved out a nice position where they are today, but, you know, opening up a number of areas of adjacent seas that they're going. So as they ride the software wave that they're pushing, it's an interesting one to set them up for the next 10 years. >>Absolutely. So what do you see are the biggest headwinds facing Nutanix right now. But as we've said, they have a passionate customer base. They've on the main stage. This morning we heard about their high net promoter score. We heard about there. They're amazing customer retention s o much repeat business. What do you think, though, Is is sort of the main What should be keeping dear Ege Pandey up at night. >>So one of the biggest challenges is you know, your 5000 person company. How do you keep growing at that pace? How can I hire we heard in Europe? It is a you know what it is a challenging market to hire. You are no longer that small startup that I'm going to get some AIPO bang for Buck. Now I'm a public company, you know, and you know, their stock incentives and things you can do. But Nutanix has a number of areas that they think they have exciting ways for people to be a part of some of these next waves that they're pushing. But that that is a big challenge. There is really cooperative in out there. We've spent much time talking about the ecosystem. They have a decent ecosystem, but their position in the cloud world Is there a player amongst many, many Betty, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of companies out there When if you go to Amazon, reinvent you confined the Nutanix booth. But it's not one of the big players there you go to the Microsoft show, go to the Google shows. They are a small piece of that. And when we asked peerages, How do you position yourself and how do you, you know, get awareness in this environment? So when they had to down quarters, it was definitely marketing and sales, where the areas that they said they could not hire fast enough so they are going to need to invest more and they still aren't profitable. So we're almost three years past the I po. If you look at the transition to software, their revenues have been relatively flat. Their margins have been going up. But the market will not reward them if they can't keep the growth going. And, you know, start getting closer to that full profitability. >>Exactly, exactly. Well, these are all gonna be topics that we're going to dig deeper into today. We've got a great lineup of gas. And then, of course, the final keynote speaker. One of your faves. >>Yeah, Well, Kit Harington. Rebecca, What did you think of Carolina? >>She was fantastic. And I think what was really exciting about the interviewee, er was name Is Hae a friend of yours? Uh was It was how he was really drawing these analogies to Nutanix journey. It's similar to that of a professional athlete, and that is someone who who's getting knocked down and has to get back up against someone who's hit winning a few things, winning some business here, but she still needs >>She made a great point where said right. You know, the day after she was named number one, her father was like, Well, you need to get lower. You need to do this. And she's like, Wait, I'm number one. But you have to keep working or everyone will come after you. And so Nutanix is in a strong position, but absolutely they know that they need to keep working and training and improving listening to their customers to move forward. >>Absolutely, absolutely. So so. I think she had a lot of lessons for for Newtown Road, for the Nutanix community to so stew. I'm excited. For Day two, We're gonna have a lot of great custom, bloody great customers and Nutanix people on the show today to >>looking forward to it. And they had a fun party last night. They had the DJs were bumping. They had nice international food, some art and some interesting people dressed up as >>hedges and food >>and things walking around. So it was a little bit weird, but a lot of fun. >>And they're the happiest country in the world. What can we say? I'm Rebecca Knight. First Amendment, stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix dot next.

(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California with CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host of this CUBE Conversation with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. CUBE alumni, very special part of our community. Great to see you again, thanks for coming in. We're previewing your big show coming up, Nutanix NEXT in Europe. Thanks for joining me. >> It's an honor. >> It's always great to get you. I saw your interview on Bloomberg with Emily Chang. Kind of short interview, but still, you're putting the message out there. You've been talking software. We covered your show here in North America. Clearly moving to the subscription model, and I want to get into that conversation. I think there's some notable things to talk about now that we're in this cloud 2.0 era, as we're calling it, kind of a goof on web 2.0. But cloud 2.0 is a whole shift happening, and you've been on it for a while. But you got the event coming up in Europe, Nutanix NEXT. What's the focus? Give a quick plug for that event. Let's talk about that. >> Yeah, in fact, the reiteration of the message is a key part of any of our user conferences. We have 14,000 customers around the world now, across 150 countries. We've done almost more than $5 billion worth of just software business in the last six, seven years of selling. It's a billion six run rate. There's a lot going on in the business, but we need to take a step back and in our user conference talk about the vision. So what's the vision of Nutanix? And the best part is that it hasn't changed. It's basically one of those timeless things that hopefully will withstand the test of time in the future as well. Make computing invisible anywhere. People scratch their heads. What does computing mean? What does invisible mean? What does anywhere mean? And that's where we'll actually go to these user conferences, talk about what is computing for us. Is it just infrastructure? Is it infrastructure and platform? Now that we're getting into desktop delivery, is it also about business users and applications? The same thing about invisible, what's invisible? For us, it's always been a special word. It's a very esoteric word. If you think about the B2B world, it doesn't talk about the word invisible a lot. But for us it's a very profound word. It's about autonomous software. It's about continuous, virtues of continuous delivery, continuous consumption, continuous mobility. That's how you make things invisible. And subscription is a big part of that continuous delivery message and continuous consumption message. >> So the event is October 9th, around the first week of October. You got some time there, but getting geared up for that. I wanted to ask you what you've learned from the North America conference and going into the European conference. It's ultimately the same message, same vision, with a tweak, you got some time under your belt since then. The subscription model business, which you were talking in your Bloomberg interview, is in play. It is not a new thing. It's been in operation for a while. Could you talk about that specifically? Because I think most people would say, hey, hardware to software, hard to do. Software subscription, hard to maintain and grow. Where are you on that transition? Explain and clarify your mix of business, hardware, software. Where are you in the progress of that transformation? >> Well, you know, I have been a big student of history, and I can't think of a company that's gone from hardware to software and software subscription in such a short span. Actually, I don't know of any company. If you know of one, please let me know. But why? The why of subscription is to be frictionless. Hybrid is impossible without having the same kind of consumption model, both on-prem and off-prem. And if we didn't go through that, we would be hypocritical as a company to talk about cloud and hybrid itself. The next 10 years for this company is about hybrid, and doing it as if private and public are one in the same is basically the essence of Nutanix's architecture. >> Well, I can think of some hardware-software dynamics that, again, might not match your criteria, but some might say Apple. Is it a software or hardware company? Hardware drives the ecosystem, they commoditize it. Peloton bicycle is a bike, but it's mainly a software business and in-person business. So there's different models. Oracle has hardware, they have software. It doesn't always relate to the enterprise. What's the argument to say, hey, why don't you just create your own box and kick ass with that box, or is it just different dynamics? What's that? >> Well, there's a tension in the system. People want to buy experiences as opposed to buying things. They don't want to integrate things, like, oh, I need to actually now get a hardware vendor to behave as a software vendor when it comes to support issues and such. And at the same time, you want to be flexible and portable. How do you really work with the customer with their relationships that they have with their hardware vendors? So the word anywhere in our vision is exactly that. It's like, okay, we can work on multiple servers, multiple hypervisors, and multiple clouds. At the end of the day, the customer experience is king. And that's one thing that the last 10 years has taught us, John, if anything, is don't sell things to people. You know, Kubernetes is a thing. Cloud is a thing. Can you really go sell experiences? The biggest lesson in the last year for us has been integrate better. Not just with partners, but also within your own products. And now if you can do that well, customers will buy from you. >> I think you just kind of clarified where I was thinking out loud, because if you think about Apple, the hardware is part of the experience. So they have to have it. >> Mm-hmm. >> You don't have to have the hardware to create those experiences. Is that right? >> Absolutely, which is why it's now 2% of our business, and yet we are saying that we take the burden of responsibility of supporting it, integrating with it. One of the biggest issues with cloud is operations. What is operations? It's day two patching. How do you do day two patching? Intel is coming up with microcode upgrades every quarter now because of security reasons. If we are not doing an awesome job of one-click upgrade of firmware and microcode and BIOS, we don't belong in the hybrid cloud world. I think that's the level of mundaneness that we've gotten to with our software that makes us such a high NPS company with our customers. >> I want to just drill in on the notion of a thing versus experience. You mentioned Kubernetes is a thing. I would say Hadoop was a thing. But Hadoop was a great example. It was hard to do. Kubernetes, jury's still out. People love them. Kubernetes, we'll see how that goes. If it can be abstracted away, it's not a thing anymore. We'll see. But Hadoop was a great example. Unbelievable technology direction, big data, all the goodness of object storage and unstructured data. We knew that. Just hard to work with. Setting up clusters, managing clusters. And it ended up being the death of the sector, in my opinion. What is an experience? Define what does that mean. Is it frictionless only? Is there a trust equation? Just unpack your vision on what that means. A thing, which could be a box with software on it, and experience, which is something different. >> Yeah, I mean, now you start to unpeel the word experience. It's really about being frictionless, trusted, and invisible. If you can really do these things well, around the word, define frictionless. Well, it has to be consumer-grade. It has to be web scalable, 'cause customers are looking for the Amazon architecture inside, and aren't just going and renting it from Amazon, but also saying, can I get the same experience inside? So you've got to make it web scale. You've got to make it consumer-grade. Because our operators and users, talk about Hadoop, I mean, they struggled with the experience of Hadoop itself because it was a thing, it was a technology, as opposed to being something that was consumer-grade itself. And then finally, security. Trust is very important. We must secure always on resilient. The word resilience is very important. In fact, that's one of the things we'll actually talk about at our conference, is resilience. What does it mean, not just for Nutanix stock, to be where it is today from where it was six months ago. And that's what I'm most proud of, is you go through these transitions, you actually talk about resilience of software, resilience of systems, resilience of customer support, and resilience of companies. >> So you mentioned hybrid cloud. We were talking before we came on camera about hybrid cloud. But software's a two-way relationship. Talk about what you mean by that, and then I want to ask you a follow-up question of where hardware may or may be an opportunity or a problem in that construct. >> Yeah, I mean, look, in the world of hybrid, what's really important is delivering an experience that's really without silos. Ideally, on-prem infrastructure is an availability zone. How do you make it look like an availability zone that can stand up shoulder-to-shoulder with a public cloud availability zone? That's where you sell an experience. That's how you talk about a management plane where you can actually have a single pane of glass that really delivers a cloud experience both ways. >> You're kind of a contrarian. I always love interviewing you because you seem to be on the next wave before any realizes it. Right now everyone's trying to go on-premise and you're moving from on-premise to the cloud. Not you guys moving, but your whole vision is. You've been there, done that on premises. Now you've got to be where the customers are, which is where they need to be, which is the cloud. I heard you say that. It's interesting, you're going the other way, right? >> Mm-hmm. But you could look at the infrastructure and say, hey, there's a lot of hardware inside these clouds that have a lot of hardware-specific features like hardware assist that software or network latency might not be able to deliver. Is that a missed opportunity for you guys, or does your software leverage these trends? And even on premises, there's hardware offload-like features coming. How do you reconcile that? Because I would just argue inside of the company, say, hey, Dheeraj, let's not go all in on software. We can maximize this new technology, this thing, for our software. How do you-- >> Look, I think if you look at our features, like security, the way we use TPM, which is a piece of assist that you get from Intel's motherboards for doing key encryption management. What does it mean to really do encryption at scale using Intel's vectored instructions? How do you do RDMA? How do you look at InfiniBand? How do you look at Optane drives? We've been really good at that lowest level, but making sure that it's actually selling a solution that can then go drive SAP HANA and Oracle databases and GPU for graphics and desktops. So as a company, we don't talk about those things because they are the how of the business. You don't talk about the how. You'd rather talk about the why and the what, actually. >> So from a business strategy standpoint, I just want to get this clear because there's downfalls for getting into the hardware business. You know them. Inventory, all these hardware cycles are moving fast. You mentioned Intel shipping microcode for security reasons. So you're basically saying you'd rather optimize for decoupling hardware from the software and ride the innovation of the hardware guys, like Nvidia and Intel and others. >> Absolutely, and do it faster than anybody else, but more integrated than anybody else. You know, all together now is kind of our message for .NEXT. How do you bring it all together? Because the world is struggling with things, and that's the opportunity for Nutanix. >> Well, I would say making compute invisible is a great tagline. I would add storage and networking to that too. >> Yeah, computing, by the way. >> Computing. >> I said computing. >> Okay, computing. >> 'Cause computing is compute storage networking. Computing is infrastructure, platform, and apps. It's a very clever word, and it's a very profound word as well. >> Well, let's just throw Kubernetes in there too and move up the stack, because ultimately, we're writing a lot of stories on covering this editorially, is that the world's flipped upside down. It used to be the infrastructure. We're calling this cloud 2.0, like I said earlier. The world used to be the infrastructure enabled what the apps could do, and they were limited to the resources they had. Now the apps are in charge. They're dictating terms below the software line, if you want to call it the app line. So the apps are in charge now. Whoever can serve up the best infrastructure capability, which changes the entire computing industry because now the suppliers who can deliver that elastic or flexible capacity or resource, wins. >> Absolutely. >> And that's ultimately a complete shift. >> You know, I tell people, John, about the strategy of Nutanix because we have some apps now. Frame is an app for us. Beam is an app. Calm is an app. These are apps, they're drawn on the platform, which is the core platform of Nutanix, the core hyper-convergence innovation that we did. If you go back to the '90s, who was to say that Windows really fueled Office or Office fueled Windows? They had to work in conjunction, because without one, there would be no, the other, actually. So without Office there would be no Windows. Without Windows there would be no Office. How platforms and apps work with each other synergistically is at the core of delivering that experience. >> I want to add just you're a student of history. As an entrepreneur, you've been there through the many waves and you also invest a lot, and I want to ask you this question. It used to be that platforms was the holy grail. You'd go to a VC and say, hey, I'm building a platform. Big time investment. An entrepreneur will come back: I got a tool. You're a feature. You're a feature, not a platform. Platforms was the elite engineering position to come in to look for the big money. How would you define platforms now? Because with cloud, if apps are in charge, and there's potential features that are coming around the corner that no one's yet invented, what is this platform 2.0 world look like if you were coming out of grad school or you were a young engineer or a young entrepreneur? How do you think about that right now? >> Well, the biggest thing is around extensibility and openness. You know, we were talking about openness before, but the idea of APIs, where API is the new graphically why, because the developer is the builder. And how do you really go sell to them and still deliver a great experience? And not just from the point of view of, well, I've given you the best APIs, but the best SDKs. What does it mean to give them a development kit that gets them up and running in no time? And maybe even a graphical Kickstarter. We're working with our partners a lot, where it's not just about delivering APIs or raw APIs because they're not as consumable, but to deliver SDKs and to deliver graphical structural kits to them so that they can be up and running, building applications in two months rather than two years. I think that's at the core of what our platform is. >> And data and having an operating system thinking seems to be another common pattern. Understand the subsystems of data. Running and assembling things together. >> I think what is Nutanix, I mean, if people ask me what is Nutanix, I start with data. Data is the core of the company. We've done data for virtualization. We're now doing data for applications with Nutanix Files. We have object store data. We are doing Era, which is database as a service. Without data, we'd be dead as a company. That's how important it is. Now, how do you meld that with design and delivery is basically where the three Ds come together: data-- >> I wrote a blog post. Dave Vellante always laughs when I bring this up because he always references it too. In 2007 I said, data is the new development kit. 'Cause back then, development kits existed. SDKs, software development kits. MSDN was Microsoft's thing. You remember those glory days, Dheeraj, I know. But the thesis was, if data does actually come in, it's actually an input into the software. This is what I think you guys are doing that is clever that's not well understood, is data is an input, like a software library almost. A module, but it's dynamic and it's always changing. And writing software for that is a nouveau kind of thing. This is new. >> Yeah, I know, and delivered to the developer, because right now data and hardware data is sitting in silos which are mainframe-like systems. How do you deliver it where they can spin it up on their own? Making sure that we democratize data is the biggest challenge in most companies. >> We're in a new era, I think you just pointed that out, and we talk about it at CUBE all the time. We don't really talk about up-front. It used to be UI was the thing, user interface, ease of use. I think now the new table stake feature in all companies is if you can't show value instantly in any solution that has a thing or things in it, then it's pretty much not going to happen. I mean, this is the new expectation that becomes the experience for-- >> Yeah, I mean, millennials are the new developers, and they need to actually see instant gratification, many of these-- >> Well, cost too. I don't want to spend a million dollars to find out it didn't work. I want to maybe spend something variable. >> And look, agility, the cliched word, and I don't want to talk about agility per se, but at the end of the day it's all about, can we provide that experience where you don't have to really learn something over 18 months and provide it in the next three hours. >> Great conversation here with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix, about his vision. I always loved your software vision. You guys have smart engineers there. Let's talk about your company. I think a lot of people at your conference and your community and others want to know, is how you're doing and how the company's doing. Because I think you guys are in the midst of a major transition we talked about earlier, hardware to software, software to subscription, recurring revenue. I mean, it's pretty much a disruptive enabler for you guys at one level as an opportunity. It's changing how you do accounting. It's having product management. Your customers are going to consume it differently. It's been a big challenge. And stock's taken a little bit of a hit, but you're kind of playing the long game. Talk about the growth strategy as you guys go forward. This has been a struggle. There's been some personnel changes in the company. What's going on? Give us the straight scoop. >> Yeah, in fact the biggest thing is about the transformation for this coming decade. And there's fundamental things that need to change for the world of cloud. Otherwise, you're basically just talking the word rather than walking the walk itself. So this last quarter I was very pleased to announce that we finally showed the first strong point of this whole transformation. There's a really good data point coming out that the company is growing back again. We beat street estimates on pretty much every metric. Billings, revenue, gross margin. And we also guided above street estimates for billings, revenue, and gross margin, and I think that's probably one of the biggest things I'm proud of in the last six, nine months of this subscription transition. We're also telling the street about how to look at us from software and support billings point of view as opposed to looking at overall billings and revenue. If you take a step back into the company, I talk about this in our earnings call, 'til three years ago, we were a commercial company, also doing federal and some international. And the last three years we proved to ourselves and to the community that we can do enterprise, you know, high-end customers, upmarket, and also do a very good job of international. Now, the next three years is really about saying, can we do both enterprise and commercial together? All together now, which is also our, coincidentally, our .NEXT message, is the proof that we actually have to go and show that we can do federal, enterprise, and commercial to really build a very large business from it. >> Well, federal's got certification levels. We know that's different depending upon which agency you're talking to. Commercial, a little bit different ball game. SaaS becomes important, cloud becomes important. The big trend is on-premise hardware. Outposts for AWS, Azure Stack for Microsoft. How do you fit into that? Because you, again, you said you're both ways. >> Mm-hmm. >> So are you worried about that? Is that a headwind, tailwind for you? What's the impact for this now fashionable on-premises shift? Which I think is just a temporary thing as cloud continues to grow. But I still argue with Michael Dell about this. I think cloud is going to be a bigger TAM. Even though there's a huge total addressable market on enterprise, that's like saying there's a great TAM for horses and buggies when cars are coming out. It's different world between public cloud and on-premises. How does that impact Nutanix, this on-premise-- >> Well, remember I said about the word anywhere in our vision? Make computing invisible anywhere? With software you can actually reduce the tension between public and private. It's not this or that. It's this and that. Our software running on Outpost is a reality. It's not like we're saying, Outpost is one thing and Nutanix is another. And that's the value of software. It's so fungible, it's so portable, that you don't have to take sides between-- >> Are you guys at ISV inside Amazon Marketplace? >> No, but again, it's still a thing. Marketplace is still not where it should be, and it's hard to search and discover things from there. So we are saying, let's do it right. Remember, we were not the first hyper-convergence company. Right? We were probably the ninth one, like the way Google was as a search engine, actually. But we did it right, because the experience mattered. You know that search box that did everything? That's what Nutanix's overall experience is today. We will do the public cloud right with our software so that we can use the customer's credits with Amazon-- >> But you're still selling direct. And your partners. >> Well, everything is coming through partners, so at the end of the day we have to do an even better job of that, like what we're doing at HPE now. I think being able to go and find that common ground with partners is what commercial is all about. Commercial is a lot about distribution. As a company, we've done a really good job of enterprise and federal. But doing it with partners-- >> What are the biggest impact areas for your business and business model, elements with software transition that you're scaling up on the subscription side? What are the biggest areas? >> Well, one is just communication, 'cause obviously a lot is changing. At a private company, things change, nobody cares. The board just needs to know about it. But at a public company, we have investors in the public market. And many of them are in the nosebleeding section, actually, of this arena. So really, you're sitting in the arena, being the man in the arena, or the woman in the arena. How do you really take this message to the bleachers section is probably the biggest one, actually. >> Well, I think one of the things I've always speculated on, you look at the growth of, just pick some stocks that we all know. VMware, Microsoft. You look at the demarcation point where, right when the stock was low to high was the shift to cloud and software. With VMware, it was they had a failing strategy and they kill it and they do a deal with Amazon. Game has changed, now they're all in the software-defined data center. Microsoft, Satya Nadella comes in, boom, they're in cloud. Real commitment. And with Microsoft specifically, that was a real management commitment. They were committed to software. They were committed to the cloud business model, and took whatever medicine they needed to take. >> That's it. That's it, you take short-term pain for long-term gain, and look, anything that becomes large over time, to me it's all about long-term greed, and I use this word a lot. I want all our employees and our customers and our investors to really think about the word. There's greed, but it's long-term greed, and that's how most companies have become large over time. So I think for us to have done this right, to say, look, we are set for the next 10 years, was very important. >> It's interesting. Everyone wants to be like Jeff Bezos. Everyone wants to be like you guys now, because long-term greed or long-term thinking is the new fashion. It's the new standard and tack. >> Yeah, I mean, look the CEOs, the top 200 CEOs, came out and talked about, are we taking good care of main street, or are we just focused on this hamster wheel of three months reporting to Wall Street alone? And I think consensus is emerging that you got to take care of main street. You and I were talking about, that I look at investors as customers, and I look at customers as investors. Which is really kind of a contrarian way of thinking about it. >> It's interesting. We live in the world, we've seen many waves. I think the wave we're on now from an entrepreneurial and venture creation standpoint, whether you're public or private, is the long game is the new 3D chess. It's where the masters are playing their best game. You look at the results of the best companies. I just bought the book about Uber from Mike Isaac from the New York Times. Short-term thinking, win at all costs, that's not the 3D chess game that's going on with entrepreneurs these days. All the investment thesis is stay long-term. And certainly now, with this perceived bubble popping, or this downturn that may or may not happen, long-term game is more important than ever. Your thoughts on it? >> I think the word authenticity has never been more important, not just in the Valley, but around the world, actually. What you're seeing with all this Me Too movement and a lot of skeletons in the cupboard out there, I think at the end of the day, the word authentic cannot be artificially created. It has to come from within. What you talk about, Satya... I look at Shantanu Narayen, the Adobe CEO, and they're authentic CEOs. I mean, I look at Dara now, at Uber, he's talking about bringing authenticity to Uber. I think there's no shortcuts to success in this world. >> I think Adobe's a great example. What they've done has been amazing. I know you're on the board there, so congratulations. Final word, I'll let you get your plug in for the event and your customer base. Talk to your customers and investors out there that might watch this. From your state of mind, what's the state of the union for Nutanix? Speak directly to your customers and investors right now. >> Well, the tagline for .NEXT Copenhagen is all together now. We're bringing clouds together. We're bringing app infrastructure and data together. I think it's a really large opportunity for us to go sell an experience to our customers, rather than selling things. All these buzzwords that come up in technology, as a company, we've done a really good job of integrating them, and the next decade is about integrating the public cloud and the private cloud. And I look at investors and customers alike. I talk about long-term greed with them. Providing an experience to them is the core of our journey. >> Thanks for your insight, Dheeraj. This was a CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (funky music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019! Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now, and speaking of geeking out, I think its going to continue because Christian Reilly is here, back on theCUBE, the vice president and CTO of Citrix. Christian, welcome back! >> Thank you so much, it's been a while. >> It has! >> It really has. >> Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. You know, the power users being that 1 percent, and what you guys started off yesterday showing, resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me, so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again, how employee experience is now elevated to a c-suite imperative, that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. >> Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life, because, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes and, you know, it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And your right, I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And, you know, quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work, and, you know, I think we've got a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the, you know, the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, is actually a really natural thing for us to go do, because we've won the trust over three decades of being, you know, the vendor to deliver mission critical apps so this is just an extension of that, but it's, yeah, it's super exciting. >> Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, "I'm going to Citrix into the application," or, "Is that on Citrix?" Or, "Is it Citrixed yet?" It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years, and I think what's really interesting, Dana Gardner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest, there should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings, so that end-users in end-users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, or some other third party healthcare solution, is being brought to you. The underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking, saying, "You know what? Citrix is going to be the future of work." Like you know what? We'll follow doing automation. Citrix can't possibly be the- be the future of work. And he announced it, but, I want to try and get you- get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big, you've been working on this for years, it shows, it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go to the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? As, you know, when Frame back in 1995 was the foundational technology for virtual applications, what's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today, that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, "Obviously, that was the innovation"? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, I think there's a of couple things really, you know, We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So, I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security performance and then productivity. So that's the foundational element, and we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions, and the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get. The more transactions you get, the more source data you get. The more source data you get, the more you can feed the machine learning model, and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace, so I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sapho technology back in November of 2018. And I think, you know, what you see there in the micros and the micro work flows, is really that big shift from the version 1 of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications, but we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application, we think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think with a couple of things, we'll look back at the Sapho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back at analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. >> And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for. To make my life easier, so that the intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn sales floors and try to talk glamor and all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I could have technology that's under the covers- under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, "this is all that she needs to do for her role," how much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? It's game-changing. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the most important thing to remember about the whole of the the strategy around analytics, is it's constantly learning, so it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about, obviously, gathering user transaction data that I talked about. That will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micros themselves, and even begin to free up more productivity. So there's a continuum here that we see. You know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening and the industry in general. You know, robotic process information has skyrocketed to the game as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use, and you know, it's been quite common, and one of the foundation- I guess foundational components that we talked about of why we did what we did was, we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies, and they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course the Pareto thing holds true there that the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with, with the intelligent workspace, the micros that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like. Whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally, or for true people who want to come in or sort of hack into your systems. The less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall. So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. >> Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP, sapphire a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experienced data, and this is the output of digital transformation, and I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data. And I think this is hopefully something you could further along the discussion. When I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data, or more access to user data, would be Microsoft via Windows. But Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through, is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and sales forces presented again, through Citrix, so you're collecting a ton of data, as customers, you know, say, "okay, what's the account balance out of SAP, let me put it into this CRM solution and sales force". You're capturing that x data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, this is where the AI comes in. From a person looking at the process, and they come to Citrix and say, "Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual use?" >> Yeah, absolutely, so I'll give you an example, you know, CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little about the vision. So I'll give you a relatively straight- forward example. So, we tend to see used cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes and the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here is what we kind of think about, so let's say, for example, that you have an employee. That employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, "actually, why do I keep approving these, because my level of trust with the employee is high, the dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low". So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them, until something was an anomaly. So if one came in that was $750, $1000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. The interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective, because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from let's say SAP Concur, and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I've said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I could get productivity back that way, by actually looking at it from a sort of, "why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the threshold that I've learned that you're comfortable with". >> What- oh, sorry Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens, and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount, and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single funding and evaluate every single line item? >> Yeah, so I think the, sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday and what we've been talking about at the show here. We're not actually changing any existing business rules or business work flow and gen components, right? So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands, you know, right now, in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, you know, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the work flows that are in the system of records. So that could be, you know, the HR system, the finance system, all the ERP system or whatever. So you know, I think when audit perspective, then we're good from that perspective, because you know, when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing it on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that, because I think the higher, you know, we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt by, and then, you know, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, that obviously, you know, there's a downside to that. So, I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about, certainly of highly regulated environments about, you know, the legality of a robot, or digital assistant, or some kind of, you know, ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So, you know, that's- this is not a GDPR thing by the way, or anything of that nature, it's more a, you know, if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines, but I think, you know, in the v1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic and the work flow. And so, you know, I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, "yeah, I kind of get it," and you know, it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. >> So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point, you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these work flows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go on to Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that, from a total addressable market that you- whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? >> Yeah, so you know, as you know well, Kieth, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And it's- the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases- and we look at sort of, some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christianson. And it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a used case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter, or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so, what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we show with the work space assistant, absolutely. I see used cases where we can give them instant productivity. So you know to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be used cases where VDI or physical Windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another, so that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think I'll look a little bit further out, you know, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday, in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to think about the work space overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app, an app is one way to consume it, but we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device, or a Microsoft device, or a Google device, or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we really then don't demand what the customers use, and ultimately their end use. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking on the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. >> So, Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98-99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, intelligence experience goes generally available later on this year, there's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues, coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? >> Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with, frankly, the brilliant team we have here at Citrix for just about three years, so I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for- I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder, again, is something we showed yesterday, but, you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to, obviously, help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out with the box micro apps and micro work flows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, "hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the constructs of your business process to enable your people". So that, to me, is kind of like, going to be the ultimate wow, when people say, "actually, I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel," as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micros and micro work flows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge and I can't wait until we've got, you know, the first examples of people who have said, "hey, you've made my life easier, I can't work without Citrix". >> While businesses can be built on that, the new Excel uh, Citrix builder, the new Excel. >> I hope so, I hope so. >> Well, we'll all be excited to- and be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Kieth and me on theCUBE, but Synergy 2019! >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Kieth Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)

Live from London England, it's the CUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome Back to the CUBE here from London. Our reporting of Nutanix NEXT 2018 in Europe. With me here is Frans Coppus. You are an ICT manager at  Driessen? I'm very curious. Driessen is a customer of Nutanix? I understand that you develop HRM software among other things? >> Tell me about Driessen.  How does this work? >> Yes, well Driessen is a family business. We are a business service provider for the public sector in the Netherlands and the Driessen Group is actually a group of companies that make employment possible. We do that through the offering  of several different services. You should think of connecting people to work, so a staffing function, but next to this , we also develop software and services to take over processes for other companies or to make processes easier. >> That sounds a bit like on one hand you are a Employment Placement company, helping people get work, but on the other hand, you also seem to do something with software and the delivery of your services as a software product. How does that work? >> Yes, that's right. We deliver services to make other companies' processes easier.  You should think of payroll and things like that, but also all other kinds of processes for which we mainly use the digital services that we develop ourselves. For example, think of  a package like AFAS profit , where AFAS profit falls short on some functionality that customers would want to make use of. We can  help those customers to provide that extra functionality to improve processes. >> Yeah, that sounds like you are software development shop. You develop the software in-house? >> Tell me more about that.  Do you do this on-premise? Do you use the cloud? What tools do your developers use? How does that work? >> Well, have a team of about 25 in-house software developers.  They are spread across a number of our different companies , and the software we develop runs  partially on prem  and partially also in the cloud. >> Yes, and I understand that you have been doing this with Nutanix for a year, year and a half to provide a foundation for your infrastructure. Can you explain how this works?  What Nutanix products and services you use? What are some of the benefits? >> Well, we started looking into modernization  of our data center at the beginning of last year. That was how it started. Then we looked further into things. We already had some interest in Nutanix. We did some more research and  ultimately we  decided to choose Nutanix and basically slowly replace our entire data center  with Nutanix. So we installed some hardware  but subsequently we also selected AHV as the hypervisor layer. We came from VMWare so we basically migrated everything. I must say that the implementation itself went very quickly. The implementation of the Nutanix environment  was really a piece of cake and then we started to migrate our VMs to the platform one-by-one.  And this year we completed this process. Currently, our entire data center is running on Nutanix.  What were the problems you were hoping to solve? Well, you should mainly think about scalability.  We liked the fact  that we could start small with Nutanix  but when needed we could scale easily. Performance was an issue in the previous environment, which we also completely resolved. I think the biggest challenge we had was to make things easier. We had created a pretty complex landscape over the years. That was actually the main reason why we ultimately chose for Nutanix. Simplification of the whole landscape. Easy to manage, especially also  since we are using a mixed solution. Partially on- prem and partially in the cloud. With Nutanix this is easy to manage. >> Yeah, exactly.  Since you are an ICT manager. I can imagine that your role also changes? I assume that at first, the main  focus was on infrastructure, as it was difficult and where attention was needed. How has your role changed over the course of time? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. That role is changing.  Initially, you are very focused on the operation to keep all the "balls in the air." All sorts of things you actually don't want to have to deal with.  And this is what we are now seeing. We are able to manage the environment with fewer people.  That means you free up more time and together with the management team,  you can use this this to look into how we can improve our services How can we improve our availability?  And all of this at equal or lower cost and with less effort. >> Yeah, and I assume, to use the word " digital transformation", is also a challenge for you? You want to move closer to your customer.  How do you do that as an IT department? How how move closer to the business internally at Driessen, but also external customers? How does that work? >>Well, the needs of the customer is often translated by the Business to the software developers. What is important for us is the time-to-market. The development life cycle is pretty rapid. We work a lot on the basis of orders and as such it often goes paired with requirements that we need to adhere to. So, time to market is very important in such cases. With Nutanix we are actually able to deploy software faster and offer new features to our software engineers  who in turn can use this. >> Yes, so you are saying that your software developers can thus get closer to the business. They require less time to lay the groundwork, as it were.  We are here at .NEXT, we have watched the  keynotes, heard a lot announcements. Nutanix started as an infrastructure. A so-called modernization of what you had. Meanwhile, there are 15 products. It has become much more gigantic. When you look at the growth of the amount of people walking around here, 3,500 people.  I am curious, how are you looking at this? You will be walking around here for a few more days. You've watched the keynotes. You see the crowds. What is your impression of the event? >> Well I must say, "very cool!" Last year I went to Nice, That was a very good conference. That was also the reason that made me think "I coming back this year for sure". During the first keynote, it was really cool to see, how much bigger the entire  event has become but also the success of Nutanix. Last year, in Nice, I spoke with  some of my peers who were still 't doubt whether they would transition to Nutanix. Well, I told him about our experiences and told them I would recommend it for sure including the use of AHV as hypervisor.   You are starting to feel how everything has matured. So much more has been added. I was impressed with what products  I have seen over the last two days along with the simplicity and maturity of the products  Really super cool to see.  What really stuck with me.   What really impressed me was Frame. Frame is really super cool. It's also something we are for sure looking at to use. In addition, Beam looks very appealing. I must honestly say, we now have our entire data center on prem. Also our DR environment is on prem, because when we made the decision, there was no Beam. If I would have to make the decision again, I would absolutely choose Beam to help solve DR. There too, the simplicity with which you can manage it is really cool to see. Well, in the future we continue  to monitor such developments and I am sure that we will work with  products such as Beam and Frame in the future. >> The made the announcement of the core product. The core products to essentials, which is a bit of the uplift. Those are the next small steps you can take. And then you get enterprise. Thats where you are especially finding the new product offerings such  SaaS products , the Xi Cloud , and what I am curious about is the following. I also know from Nutanix from the perspective of infrastructure? I have seen them grow. And looking at all the announcements they have made. All those products they have developed  What was for you the lightbulb moment?  The moment where you thought "when I get home after the weekend,  I am going to use this?" I want to learn more about this!"  What is that one product from which you say  I want to get started with that!" >> I think , if I had to choose it, then I would say, "I will definitely get started with Frame"   to look at how we can provide our colleagues with a workplace when they work remote or things like that. >> Yes, >> Is also one of the issues that you are trying to solve using Nutanix? Traditionally, Nutanix did lots of VDI. Still does a lot of VDI. Is that something that the Driessen Group is moving towards? >> Yeah, well at least for a part of our colleaguesI, I see ways to implement Frame as a substitute for a VDI environment. >> Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Exactly. Yes. Exactly right.  >> Also, I was really...  and I did not realize that  they were working on this, but Nutanix  is building its own Cloud I am very curious what this will bring.  Especially if this will seamlessly integrate with your on prem environment. At the moment, I find that to be the strength of Nutanix?  The fact that you can  you can easily switch between on your own prem Nutanix environment or a cloud environment. Well, if there is also another Nutanix in the Cloud option, that would be cool. Exactly. >> All right, last question. You employ developers  Today, we also saw some announcements  during the keynote around cloud-native as it is called so nicely So Karbon, databases in the Cloud with Era with Buckets, S3, S3 storage. Are these things from which you think,  "my developers will make use of this?" Yes. Yes. My developers are all knocking on the door.  They want to  get started with containers and other stuff. So that's very good to hear that Nutanix is also diligently working on that and how it will integrate within Nutanix.  So my software developers will be very happy with that. >> Yeah, great!  Well congratulations! That really sounds like a top store!. A very nice story about Driessen. how you are using Nutanix. Well, I wish you success with your next steps that you will undoubtedly take. That was it for now.  Thanks for watching the Cube together with Frans here in London Til next time.

>> Live from London England, it's The Cube, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer. And you're watching The Cube, and actually Bear Grylls is going to be on the keynote shortly, but we're gonna talk a little bit more tech first. First of all I wanna welcome back to the program Chris Kaddaras is the senior vice president and general manager for EMEA with Nutanix, and welcome to the program for the first time, Sylvain Siou, senior director of Systems Engineering, also for EMEA with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so Chris, we were thinking back, two years ago, the first European show in Vienna, I had you on the program, and you were fresh on, I always loved getting people when they're fresh into the company because they have the why they're joining in, why they think they're doing things. So, bring us up to speed. Two years, couple things have changed in Nutanix, couple things have changed in the industry, but why don't you bring us up to speed? >> Sure, no I'm happy to do that. First I'll tell you that some of the things I told you on the show two years ago actually proved true. I could see the energy in Vienna at that time in regards to what I call kind of a religious following in Nutanix because of the compelling-ness of the technology and the solution, and that hasn't stopped. One thing that I wasn't quite prepared for is just the rate of growth of this company, and how our customers really embraced us in the market. Now in the EMEA market we've had some success I would say. The team's done a really good job. When I started we had less than a thousand customers, now we have over 3,000 customers. When I started with Nutanix, in the region we had about 200 employees, now we have almost 800 employees in the region. So collectively as a region we're growing a bit faster than the rest of the world which is a good thing for us, and customers are showing their appreciation for us, so it's been a really good experience, but something like the hyper-growth that we have at Nutanix takes some getting used to when you come from other companies, but it's been a really good thing for our customers. The thing that I think I'm the most proud of is we've done that hyper-growth and we've still kept our NPS score above 90 for our customers, so our customers are getting a really good experience both from our sales teams, our product, our implementation teams, and our support teams, that it's kept everything in check for our customers which I'm really proud of. >> Well congratulations on that. Sylvain I have to think that your team has something to do with that NPS score. In my career, I have great respect for the SEs, they're the one that have to not only know the product inside and out, but they need to be working closely with the customers, have a good viewpoint on the customers. Being here at a European show, I wanna get your viewpoint. Tell us, what's different here compared to what you hear from people back at Corporate, what are some of the differences here your team sees? >> So we have a very good relationship with Corporate, so we're really aligned and we're involved in the project in same way as any other region. I think we were faster on some very big accounts, and that was really surprising and also the, I think the timing for the need of the customer to solve situation after virtualization was the exact timing when we start in EMEA, the product was mature enough so that was exactly the right timing, it's five years ago when I joined, so really we solved this first situation and after that everything we promised in term of making this platform a true cloud platform for enterprise is there, I think all these services on top of it, who have the same kind of services you can see on public cloud, is there, we show it this morning, and now giving the ability to the customer to manage situation with this cloud from different providers and what is on premise is there, so I think all the control, the costs on the compliance and so on have done a lot to manage the situation and take you through the control everyday. >> So, what is the adoption maybe compared to the US for the core products that you have now versus the additional services? Is there a big change or a big difference between the US and Europe or, what are you seeing with your customers? >> So, we follow the same path. There is some region and maybe I will relay on Chris, some region that we invest later than the others so, of course France, Germany, UK, Northern Europe was really the beginning and after that we have more southern regions or eastern region that come after, but we are surprised sometimes because people can jump to the last technology faster than the others, so I don't think there are really rules, there is really people who is painpoint, we have the solution, and when it fits, they go faster. >> Yeah I think from a solution perspective we are thriving at the same rate our emerging technologies into the market as our other regions in the world. In some cases we're ahead, things like IoT, what was originally called Sherlock, we're ahead, we have like first customer, second customer to start coming to adopt, so we do have markets within the EMEA region that are much earlier adopters compared to other regions. Think of places like the Middle East, the Nordics, France, adopting much quicker than some other regions of the world. So we see our new products starting to roll, we're really excited about Xi Leap, I know that the first instantiation went live, I think yesterday or today within the Americas, we're looking forward to going live within London, and then moving in to mainland Europe from there, and I think that will be a huge difference-maker for us in the markets as well. >> So looking at those regions specifically, I know there's a couple of markets in Europe, especially Germany, that have such strict data sovereignty laws that it makes it really difficult to actually do business from a DR or cloud perspective. How's Nutanix dealing with that? >> I think that's where we... When we have our SAS-based products, that's a challenge. When we have our cloud-based products, that's a challenge.` So, for our cloud-based products we have a plan really quickly to go into places that have data sovereignty compliance regulations that they have to adhere to. So Germany, we have a plan to go into Germany really quickly; we obviously have a plan to go into some other markets, Amsterdam, we have a plan to go into London for cloud. For SAS, a lot of customers are consuming SAS and they're okay if there's a good security problem, parameter around SAS, and they're consuming Salesforce.com without data centers, they're consuming other products that way so, as long as we put the right security parameters in place, then their consumption model around SAS is typically gonna work, I don't see us distributing SAS data centers all throughout every market in the world to do that. Our core product right now consumption is mostly local, and it's consumed either in an appliance way or it's consumed in a software way, so that's not something that we have to worry about. >> Yeah it's interesting, you wonder if North America has a greater adoption of public cloud, if that actually gets you an advantage in the EMEA region here to get deeper with some of the core and essential offerings. >> It does; customers will adopt a private cloud because of those data sovereignty regulations. But a lot of the uber-clouds have come in and solved that, they've come in into country, they've created gov clouds, they've done it in Germany, they've done it in the UK, so they're starting to solve that, but they have to put out a lot of investment to do that. But it has given us a lead in the marketplace, but there are certain markets that are very much like the US market, so the UK, it's very similar to the US market with regards to uber-cloud or public cloud adoptions so in that market we have a lot of opportunities with somebody like Beam, because they've consumed a lot of the other uber-clouds, whether it's AWS, UCP, or... And we have that opportunity to sit down and provide them with solutions. >> Sylvain, what else are you hearing from your customers, what are some of the pain points that they're feeling that your team's able to help with? >> Clearly in the past we saw the proliferation of the VM, and we find a way to control that, but with the cloud the proliferation is without any limits. So really this is something important for the customer to take back control, take control of the shuttle IT and so on, and it's very lowly. And also I want to take a specific point really the R&D are really taken care of when we see in the field, I will take just an example, the synchronus replication, metro-culturing and stuff like this to high availability, between (inaudible) and so on, it's typically European, because we have fiber, we are really city close to each other and so on, in America, that makes no sense, and really at really early stage of the company we get the R&D taking care of that, developing specifically for our market what is needed for our market, and it means that we're a really global company and not really American company, we have also R&D in different places, we have in Serbia with Frame, we have in India, and so on, so really to be really taking care of each issue or pain point of the customer is really our main driver. >> So one of those other differences I see a lot is the scale of the organization, the size. So what is an SMB in the Americas might be an enterprise in Europe. So what are the solutions you have for those types of customers, for that problem? >> So definitely we need, so we are talking to customers we have a critical science, they need to have a minimum of VM to face the issue of the bottom neck of the storage or the management part and so on, but also we have example of small customers just need a platform that works, and don't want to have anyone taking care of it. And so now it's like you phone, you don't take care of the storage and CPU, it's just your application and that's it, could be internal, external, and so on, so really the SMB of course is not the main market for us, it's more the big account and so on, but we have all kinds of customers in any verticals, there is no specific one that we cover, and it's really because the platform is something that has become just normal to be invisible. >> Yeah I would add on that, if you don't mind, I'd say that the nice thing about the product is it's in a form factor in a pricing mechanism that can be consumed from SMB all the way up to global accounts. That's the nice thing. Now, maybe we spend a lot of our field resource on mid-market up, because that's where we get larger transactions from customers, and it's just a value conversation with regards to return on investment, but the nice thing is our product can be consumed at the smallest customer. We have just released new pricing mechanisms that allow our customers to now consume at much smaller levels, so we're not allow for SMB but for ROBO, because if you think about it if you just have a one size fits all pricing structure how does that work in the data center, that same price doesn't work in the ROBO area, so you have to give the customers the ability to look at the same experience in the remote office or the small sites compared to a data center, and that's something that we've just kinda brought to the market in the last three to four months, and I think that's a real advantage of not only the product but the pricing structure. >> Chris, we wanna give you the final word. If EMEA customers, what do you want them taking away from this week? >> Sure. I think, they've already told me, and I'll tell you, which is good, 'cause it's what I want them to take away, is just the credibility that Nutanix is here for the enterprise work load, they can look at their entire data center delivery mechanism on a Nutanix platform. But also Nutanix is a company they should be looking for for their cloud-based platform. There is a decision in the marketplace to be had right now around what do you use for your cloud, lack of a better word, orchestration layout, cloud automation layout? And there's only a few choices in the market today, some of them are more open source, some of them are specific vendors, and what I want them to take way is Nutanix is an option for that, leave it up to me and my team to prove why we think we're the best option for it, but that's really what I want them to take away, the credibIlity of tier one platforms running Nutanix in their data center, and then two, Nutanix for the cloud-based platform. >> Congratulations on the progress. I wanna say some feedback I've heard from customers is despite how fast Nutanix has been growing, they still feel that they're getting the personal touch, don't feel like just a number for some fast-growing company so congrats on that, I know a lot of effort goes into that. Alright so we're at the end of the Day 1 for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Minimn, be sure to join us tomorrow for a full day of wall-to-wall coverage. Of course go to theCube.net for all the websites to watch us live and on demand for all the shows we're doing and once again thank you for watching the cube. (digital music)

>> Live from London, England, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. This is The Cube's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. 3,500 people gathered to listen to Sunil Potti. >> Thanks, Stu. >> For the keynote this morning, Sunil's the chief product and development officer with Nutanix. Glad we moved things around, Sunil, 'cause we know events, lots of things move, keynotes sometimes go long, but happy to have you back on the program. >> No, likewise, anytime. >> All right, so, I've been to a few of these and one of the things I hope you walk us through a little bit. So Nutanix, simplicity is always at its core. I have to say, it's taken me two or three times hearing the new, the broad portfolio, the spectrum, and then I've got the core, I've got essentials, I've got enterprise. I think it's starting to sink in for me, but it'll probably take people a little bit of time, so maybe let's start there. >> I mean, I think one of the biggest things that happened with mechanics is that we went from a few products just twelve months ago to over ten products within the span of a year. And both internally as well as externally, while the product values are obviously obvious, so it's more the consumption within our own sales teams, channel teams, as well as our customer base, needed to be codified into something that could be a journey of adoption. So we took it customer inwards, in about a journey that a customer goes through in adopting services in a world of multi-cloud, and before that, before you get to multi-cloud, you have to build a private cloud that is genuine, as we know. And before we do that, we have to re-platform your data center using HCI, so that's really if you work backwards to that, you start with core, which is your HCI platform for modernizing your data center and then you expand to a cloud platform for every workload, and then you can be in a position to actually leverage your multi-cloud services. >> Yeah, and I like that. I mean, start with the customer first, is where you have and I mean the challenge is, you know, every customer is a little bit different. You know, one of the biggest critiques of, you know, you say, okay, what is a private cloud? because they tend to be snowflakes. Every one's a little bit different and we have a little bit of trouble understanding where it is, or did it melt all over the floor. So give us a little bit of insight into that and help us through those stages, the dirty, the crawl-walk-run. >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing everyone has to understand here is that these are not discrete moving parts. Core is obviously your starting point of leveraging computer storage in a software defined way. The way that Amazon launched with EC2 and S3, right. But then, every service that you consume on top of public cloud still leverages computer storage. So in that sense, essentials is a bunch of additional services such as self-service, files, and so forth, but you still need the core to build on essential, to build a private cloud And then from there onwards, you can choose other services, but you're still leveraging the core constructs. So in that sense, I think, both architecturally as well as from a product perspective, as well as architecturally from a packaging perspective, that's why they're synergistic in the way that things have rolled out. >> Okay, so looking at that portfolio. A lot of the customers I work with now, they don't start out in a data center, they've already moved past that, right? So they are leveraging a partner, the public cloud, they might not even be running virtual machines at all anymore. How does that fit into your portfolio? >> Yeah, I mean, increasingly what we are realizing, and you know, we've done this over the last couple of years, is for example, with Calm, you can only use Calm to manage your public clouds without even managing your private cloud of Nutanix. Increasingly with every new service that we're building out, we're doing it so that people don't have to pay the strategy tax off the stack. It needs to be done by a desire of I want to do it versus I need to do it. So, with Frame, you can get going on AWS in any region in an instant or Azure. You don't need to use any Nutanix software. Same thing with Epoch, with Beam. So I think as a company, what we're essentially all about is about saying let us give you a cloud, service-like experience, maybe workload-centric. If it is desktops and so forth. Or if you are going to be at some point reaching a stage where you have to re-platform your data center to look like a public cloud, then we have the core, try and call it platform itself that'll help you get there as well. >> So, looking at re-platforming that data center. If I were to do that now for a customer I wouldn't be looking at virtual machines, storage, networking, I'd be looking at containers or serverless or you know, the new stuff. Again, what is Nutanix's answer to that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what we've found is that there's quite a bit of an option, obviously, of cloud-native ads, but when it comes to mainstream budget allocation, it's still a relative silo in terms of mainstream enterprise consumption. So what we're finding out is that if you could leverage your well-known cloud platform to not create another silo for Kubernetes, don't create another silo for Edge or whatever the new use-cases are, but treat them as an extension of your core platform. At least from a manageability perspective and an operations perspective, then the chances of you adopting or your enterprise adopting these new technologies becomes higher. So, for example, in Calm, we have this pseudonym called Kalm with a K, right. Which essentially allows Kubernetes containers to run natively inside a Calm blueprint, but coexist with your databases inside of EM because that's how we see the next-generation enterprise apps morphing, right. Nobody's going to rewrite my whole app. They're going to maybe start with the web tier and the app tier as containers, but my database tier, my message queue tier, is going to be as VMs. So, how does Calm help you abstract the combination of containers and VMs into a common blueprint is what we believe is the first step towards what we call a hybrid app. And when you get to hybrid apps, is when you can actually then get to eventually all of your time to native cloud apps. >> You know, one of the questions I was hearing from customers is, they were looking for some clarity as to the hybrid environments. You know, the last couple of shows, there was a big presence of Google at the show and while I didn't see Google here on the show floor, I know there was an update from kind of, GCP and AHV. Is Google less strategic now, or is it just taking a while to, you know, incubate? How do you feel about that? >> So the way that you'll see us evolve as we navigate the cloud partnerships is to actually find the sweet spot of product-market fit, with respect to where the product is ready and where the market really wants that. And some of it is going to be us doing, you know, a partnership by intent first and then as we execute, we try to land it with honest products. So, where we started off with Google, as you guys know, is to actually leverage the cloud platform side, core locator with Google data centers and then what we we've evolved to is the fact that our data centers can quote-unquote integrate with their data centers to have a common management interface, a common security interface and all, but we can still run as core-located ones. Where the real integration that has taken some time for us to get to is the fact that, look, in addition to Calm, in addition to GKE kind of things, is rather than run as some kind of power sucking alien on top of some Google hardware, true integration comes with us actually innovating on a stack that lands AH3 natively inside GCP and that's where nested virtualization comes in and we have to take that crawl-walk-run approach there because we didn't want to expose it to public customers what we didn't consume internally. So what we have with the new offering that now is called Test Drive is, essentially that. We've proven that AH3 can run a nested virtualization mode on GCP natively, you can core locate with the rest of GCP services, and we use it currently in our R&D environment for running thousands of nodes for pretty much everyday testing on a daily basis, right. And so, once customer interview expose that now as an environment for our end customers to actually test-drive Nutanix as a fully compatible stack though, on purpose, so you have Prism Central, the full CDP stack and so forth, then as that gets hardened over a period of time, we expose that into production and so forth. >> So there's one category of cloud I haven't heard yet, and that's the service providers. So Nutanix used to be a really good partner for service providers, you know, enabling them to deliver services locally to local geography, stuff like that, so what's the sense of Nutanix regarding these service providers currently? >> Yeah, I think that frankly, that's probably a 2019 material change to our roadmap. It's your, the analogy that I have is that when we first launched our operating system, we fist had to do it with an opinionated stack using Supermicro. Most importantly, from an end-customer perspective, they got a single throat to choke, but also equally importantly, it kept the engineering team honest because we knew what it means to do one pick-up page for the full stack. Similarly, when we launched Xi, we needed to make sure we knew what SREs do, right. That scale, and so that's why we started with our version of SMC on, you know, as you guys know with Additional Reality as well as partners like Xterra. But very soon you're going to see is, once we have cleared that opinionated stack, software-wise we're able to leverage it, just like we went from Supermicro to Dell and Lenovo and seven other partners, you're going to see us create a Xi partner network. Which essentially allows us to federate Xi as an OS into the service providers. And that's more a 2019 plus timeframe. >> Yeah, speaking along those lines, the keynote this morning, Karbon with a k talked about Kubernetti's. Talk about that, that's the substrate for Nutanix's push toward cloud natives, so-- >> Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to hear that in the day two keynote as well, is basically, customer's want, as I said, an operating system for containers that is based on well-known APIs like Kube Cattle from Kubernetes and all that, but at the same time, it is curated to support all of the enterprise services such as volumes, storage, security policies from Flow, and you know, the operational policies of containers shouldn't be any different from Vms. So think about it as the developers still a Kubernetes-like interface, they can still port their containers from Neutanix to any other environment, but from an IT ops side, it looks like Kubernetes, containers, and VMs are co-residing as a first-class option. >> Yeah, I feel like there had been a misperception about what Kubernetes is and how it fits, you know. My take has been, it's part of the platform so there's not going to be a battle for a distribution of Kubernetes because I'm going to choose a platform and it should have Kubernetes and it should be compatible with other Kubernetes out there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's going to be like a feature of Linux. See, in that sense, there's lots of Linux distros but the core capabilities of Linux are the same, right. So in that sense, Kubernetes is going to become a feature of Linux, or the cloud operating system, so that those least-common denominator features are going to be there in every cloud OS. >> Alright, so Kubernetes not differentiating just expand the platform >> Enabling >> Enabling peace. So, tell us what is differentiating today? You know, what are the areas where Nutanix stands alone as different from some of the other platform providers of today? >> I think that, I mean obviously, whatever we do, we are trying to do it thoughtfully from the operational, you know, simplicity as a first-class citizen. Like how many new screens do we add when we use new features? A simple example of that is when we did micro-segmentation. The part was to make sure you could go from choosing ten VMs to grouping them and putting a policy as soon as possible as little friction of adopting a new product. So, we didn't have to "virtualize" the network, you didn't need to have VX LANs to actually micro-segment, just like in public cloud, right. So I think we're taking the same thing into services up the stack. A good one to talk about is Error. Which is essentially looking at databases as the next complex beast of operational complexity, besides. Especially, Oracle Rack. And it's easier to manage postcrest and so forth, but what if you could simplify not just the open source management, but also the database side of it? So I would say that Error would be a good example of a strategic value proposition or what does it mean to create a one plus one equals three value proposition to database administrators? Just like we did that for VIR vetted administrators, we're now going after DBS. >> Alright, well, Sunil thank you so much. Wish we had another hour to go through it, but give you the final word, as people leave London this year, you know, what should they be taking away when they think about Nutanix? >> I think the platform continues to evolve, but the key takeaway is that it's a platform company. Not a product company. And with that comes the burden, as well as the promise of being an iconic company for the next, hopefully, decade or so. All right, thanks a lot. >> Well, it's been a pleasure to watch the continued progress, always a pleasure to chat. >> Thank you >> All right, for you Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from Nutanix's .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)

>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Joep Piscaer, and you're watching theCUBE here at Nutanix .NEXT, London, 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj, thanks so much. Congratulations on 3500 people here at the third annual European show, and thanks so much for having theCUBE. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. So, Dheeraj, first of all, you got a lot going on. Big company event here, last night you announced the Q1 2019 earnings. I guess, step back for a second. Nutanix is now, nine years since the founding, you've been public now for a little while, you got to be feeling good. The company's reached a certain size, very respected in the marketplace. So how are you and the team feeling? >> Yeah, well, I tell people that it's actually fun to be a public company. And obviously there is a cost to being a public company, because you're on a quarterly treadmill, in some sense. But Wall Street also keeps you honest. Just like Main Street keeps you honest on quality of product and customer service, Wall Street keeps you honest on spend and what does it really mean to grow at scale. So I like the fact that there is two good streets that are keeping the company honest. And it's really fun to think about capital allocation, one of the big things as you grow. I mean, you're going to spend more than a billion dollars this year alone. How do you allocate capital wisely is something that I think a lot about in (mumbles). >> Yeah. So, at this show, you kind of change some of the positioning of the portfolio. It's the Core, Essentials, and Enterprise, and right, that asset allocation, when I look at Essential, Xi Cloud, there's all these different pieces, some of them through acquisition, some of them created internally. You need to be careful that you don't over-commit, but when do you decide to kill stuff or keep it going, so you got a lot of plates to spin now, a lot more than you did a year or two ago. >> Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just product development. It's also marketing and sales and G&A. I mean, there's other departments we need to think hard about. Like, how do you create brand awareness for these new things? How do you do demand generation? How do you have a specialty sales force? All those things have to be considered, so, nine years, it's been a journey, but it still looks like it's nothing. And we're still a very small company, and we need to think hard about the next five years, in some sense. >> Yeah. So, one of the metrics you gave Wall Street to be able to look at is, what percentage of customers are using more than just the Core? So the Essentials or the Enterprise. And if I got it right, it's up to 19% from 15%, the quarter before. I wonder, is the packaging, how much of that is for Wall Street? Somebody cynically might look and be like, hey, is the Core market slowing down? And therefore you need to expand. We've all seen public companies that need to go into adjacencies, and shouldn't you stick to your knitting? You've got a great solid product with leadership in the marketplace. >> Yep, absolutely. Also, look, we are not bundling them in SKUs so we cannot force customers to actually buy them. We're not doing financial engineering of dollars, because these not SKUs or bundles. This is a journey which is mostly advisory, in some sense. This is how you should start, this is how you should go, and this is advisory for our sellers and our buyers and our channel people. Everybody needs to say, look, have the customer go through the journey. If you had to do what he just said, probably would've bundled them in SKUs and then allocated capital to one or the other. I think, to your other comment about just sticking to the core, Juniper stuck to the core. And many companies out there which just stayed as a single-box company, they stayed at the core. And eventually you realize the market has moved faster than your core itself. So there's this business school thinking, they call it the Icarus Effect. The Icarus Effect is all about, I'm so good at what I do that I can fly to the sun and nothing will happen. But you don't realize that Icarus, the wings were actually pasted using wax. And you go to the sun, and the sun actually melts the wax. So companies like FGI and SUN, Norca, many companies just stuck to one thing. And they couldn't evolve, actually. >> Obviously you're not sticking to the core alone, right? You're expanding the portfolio, I mean, you're not just an infrastructure company anymore. You do so much on top of the infrastructure on-prem. You have so many SAP services, so how do you manage the portfolio in terms of the customer journey? Because there's so much to tell to a customer. How do you sell it? How do you convince a customer to go from Core to Essentials to Enterprise? >> The most important thing is leverage. Is Essentials going to leverage Core, and is the Enterprise going to leverage Essentials and Core itself? Case in point, Files is completely built on top of Core. So every time somebody's using Files, they're also using Core. If you think about Flow, it uses AHV underneath. Frame, and case in point. When it's going to deliver desktops, it's going to use Files because every desktop needs a filer as well. And then when Frame delivers desktops on-prem, it's going to use all the Core. So the important thing is how they don't become disparate things, like they're all going in their own direction, is there a level of progressiveness where you say, well, if you're using the Enterprise features, a lot of them actually go in and drag in the Core as well as Essentials. So how do we build that progressive experience for the customer, where each of these layers are actually being utilized, is the important piece. >> Dheeraj, so, we're talking a lot about the expansion beyond the Core. But there was a pretty significant activity that your team did on Core itself. So the first time I heard about it, it basically said, we're doing an entire file system rewrite. Think of it almost as AoS 2.0. Now, from a product name, I believe it's 5.10, so I might have trouble remembering which release it was, but talk about what went involved in that. Obviously a lot has changed in the nine years since you created it, so. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yesterday in the earnings call I talked about it too, that people scoff at Core infrastructure. Like, oh, it's going to be a commodity because it's good enough infrastructure. But then I argue that there's no such thing as good enough infrastructure. And companies struggle when they don't focus on infrastructure itself. It's like food, shelter, clothing in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't get that, then there's no point self-actualizing it. So, Core infrastructure completely destroys network insecurity. You got to get it right. I mean, look at Oracle, how it's struggling with IaaS. And look at Google, they're trying to figure out how to make it relevant for the Enterprise. Azure has like three or four different stacks for infrastructure. One for old 265, one for Azure DB, one for Azure, and now they're rewriting it for Azure itself. VMware has three different infrastructure stacks. One for three tier, where they are very happily, they're saying, look, let EMC, their NetApps actually are underneath, and Cisco's, and stuff like that. And then they have this software-defined infrastructure with commodity servers. And finally, they have VMware-enabled AWS which is going to use AWS services. So now you have three different forks of your core base, in some sense. And for us, what's important is how we use a single core base for everything. So architecture matters. I was arguing yesterday in the earnings call that good enough infrastructure is an oxymoron. You need to get core right before you can go and try to live the other layers of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, actually. And that's why we went back and thought about, as the workloads were growing and increasing, and we had mission-critical stuff in memory databases, what do we need to really do about the way we lay out the data and lay out the metadata? So as you know, metadata is at the core of anything in systems, and especially storage systems. And the metadata of our erstwhile system was actually very completely distributed. And then we realized that some things can be local, and some things can be distributed, and that's better scale. Again, going back to this understanding of what things can be represented locally for a certain disk versus what things need to be global so that you can go and say, okay, where is this data really located? What drive? But once you go to the drive, you can actually get more metadata. So, again, you're getting more progressive scanning. So at the end of the day, our engineers are constantly thinking about performance and scalability, and how do you change the wings of the plane at 35,000 feet? It's a very big challenge. >> So that's one of the issues, right? So you're still focusing on your own infrastructure layer, right? But many customers do already have presence in a different hardware stack, or the public cloud, or some service provider. So not everything runs on your platform. So how are you planning to deliver the services ensemble to customers that don't necessarily run on AoS? >> So that's the multi-cloud journey, which is basically the enterprise journey of our customers. I said this yesterday in the earnings call as well, that all our services should be available both on-prem and off-prem. This idea of a VPC, that is multi-location, is what hybrid cloud is all about. So how do you get a virtual private cloud to really span multiple clouds in multiple locations? I think you saw from the demos today of how you're really running all of AoS on top of GCP virtual infrastructure. And in the course of the coming year or two, you'll see us do the same thing, BEM at Amazon, BEM at Azure. Because they deliver servers in their data centers and that's leverage for them because they've already gone and spent so much money on data centers that it's easy for them to deliver a physical server that our software can run on top of. And if people are not using AoS, they'll still want to use things like Frame and Beam and COM and other such things like that. >> Yep, Dheeraj, what are you hearing from customers and how do you think of hybrid, as it were? You know, a lot of attention gets played to things like Azure Stack from Microsoft from VMware on AWS, I know you've got some view points on this. >> Yeah, no, in fact, so if you go back five years, hyperconvergence had become a buzz word maybe three, four years ago. And there were a lot of companies doing hyperconvergence. And only one or two have survived and it's us and VMware, basically have survived that. Everybody else has a checkbox because the customers said well, what about that? Will we have a check box? But, it's really about operating system sort of hyperconvergence. And it has to be honest. And it has to really blur the lines between compute and storage and networking and security. I think hybrid needs to be honest and one of the killer things that hybrid needs is blurring the lines between networks, blurring the lines on storage so you can do one click replication and one click fail over. So a lot of those things have required a lot of innovations from us. That's why we were delayed in Xi. We didn't want to just put up data centers and just like that. I mean, if you go back in time to many hardware companies were putting open stack data centers and calling it their new cloud in response to Amazon. And VMware tried vCloud Air. And they had a charter to go spend money. They weren't going to spend a ton of money on hardware. Without even knowing that the cloud is not about data centers. Cloud is about an experience. It's about eCommerce and computing coming together. And you have to be passionate about a catalog. You know, the marketplace, the catalog so that people can really go and consume things from a catalog. I think that's what our experience has been that. Look, if you don't think of it like a retail giant or retail customer, which is what Amazon has done such a good job of. You know, they've thought about computing as an eCommerce problem as opposed to as a compute storage networking problem itself. And those are the lessons that we have learned about hybrid just as much >> Alright, you did a nice job on the keynote, laying out that Nutanix, like your customers, you're going through a journey. The crawl-walk-run, if you will. We got a tease in the keynote this morning about something cloud native. Where you're going. Final question for you is as you look at the company, you said it's still young, where are your customers going, where are some of the things they need to work on, and that Nutanix will mature with them as we look to move forward? >> Well, I mean, look. I think everybody knows where customers are headed. They're questioning who fulfills the promise because the requirements are all the same. They all want to go and use next generation infrastructure, they want to modernize their data centers, the infrastructure. They want to use some things that they want to own, some things they want to rent. The question is, where is the best experience possible? And by that, I mean not just systems experience of hybrid clouds but also customer service and having an ever-growing catalog and being able to deliver things for developers and devops. And technology will come and go. Two, three years ago, the Puppet and Chef were the hottest thing on, now today, it's Kubernetes. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. It's the fact that what you see is what you do. And what you do is what you say. In our business, it's about integrity. I was arguing about this yesterday in the earnings call, as well, that building business software is a little bit easier. I shouldn't trivialize it as much but if people use business software, they can work around weaknesses of business software. But if you are in the business of infrastructure, applications cannot work around weaknesses of infrastructure. So integrity matters a lot in our space, actually, and that is about great products, great customer service, fast innovation, recovering fast, being resilient. Those are the things that we focus a lot on. >> Alright, well, Dheeraj, thanks again, always. We didn't even get to talk about the width part, the fourth H that you've been talking about for the honest, humble, and hungry. So, thank you. Congratulations to the team and always appreciate you having on our program. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us. Two days live of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music) >> I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now. And so I've had the opportunity as a marketer.

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron inside 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Valentin I'm here with my co-host David Floria we're covering micron insight 2018 really bring it together memory storage and artificial intelligence talking about AI for good talking about changing the way in which we work new workloads Raj to Lori is here he's the senior vice president and general manager of microns a booming mobile business unit rise I think it's the fastest growing business unit at micron at least of XY's and Keith crescent is here is the senior vice a senior vice president at Qualcomm Keith welcome thank gentlemen thanks for coming on the cube okay thank you so right let's let's start with you what are the big trends that you see that are driving that at 60% growth rate in your business yeah I mean we are finding now that you know mobile phones and use of memory in mobile phones and this is DRAM and also use of storage in mobile phones this is where we actually you know like flash both are growing inside a mobile phone you know we've seen people launch you know four and six gigabyte phones and now we have our customers talking about 8 and 10 and 12 gigabyte phones in the future and one of the big reasons is the applications you know a lot of machine learning and AI applications from the phones and those are driving the need for a lot of increased both storage and memory so we talked about what's changing in your business over the last several years I mean mobile obviously exploded onto the scene but now people are talking about AI and mobile and and and just increase use cases and applications so what's going on from your perspective yeah I think my handset perspective there's been some visual changes right the screens got a little bigger the bezels get smaller phones get a little thinner and so you see some of the visual cues but really the excitement of what's going on underneath the visual cues so the amount of AI processing is accelerating at a rapid pace a lot of advanced cameras you know moving from two three four and now their phones with five cameras cameras to recognize depth perception there's a voice recognition so there's a lot of AI processing and a lot of capability getting into the phone for a variety of applications okay so voice recognition that makes sense you'd use AI for that but you're talking about AI in in visual and in in the handset talk more about that explain how that all works yeah so so actually I would argue that today imaging is probably the primary application of AI so cameras used to be just capturing pixels but now it's about much more than capturing pixels it's about understanding what those pixels are so are they recognizing objects or food or something else or is it facial recognition for things like payments and biometrics and so the cameras now are much more intelligent and with multiple cameras you're adding depth information so then you start to get to much higher levels of realism for things like avatar and gaming and other areas where the camera is capturing and also perceiving so not a hot dog for you fans of the show Silicon Valley so but Raj what does this all mean for the the memory and storage requirements yeah I mean eyes keep mentioned I think you know the mobile phone you know with the process from Qualcomm and and other processor vendors has really gotten to have a lot more camera applications and a lot more AI applications now there's a there's a difference when you actually drive applications that need AI and machine learning versus other applications and the difference is that the compute paradigm in AI and ml is different in the sense that these are like complex neural networks that need a load of lot of data very close to the processor to achieve the result so as more AI applications come in we are actually finding that the customers which are Qualcomm customers and our customers are asking for more processing from the airside but they're also asking for more higher speeds higher density memory to kite to couple tightly with the process so they can realize these AI applications for the consumers and also storage because sometimes you want to store a lot of the images and videos on the card so both storage and memory are increasing as applications come in but I'd like to ask about the gaming side of things and the ante AR that seems to me that is is starting to improve to a level which is frightening linear reality what do you have to do to get it to that stage where you can have true VR and have games for example which exploit that sure so maybe first I'll talk about gaming specifically gaming obviously continues to grow a lot of money in gaming gaming tournaments and so forth the gaming certainly is getting more realistic with better graphics and so forth better displays multiplayer gaming very hot right multiplayer gaming requires you know very fast connections very low latency connections to another source so play multiple players can play at the same time also many times for games you'll have a play with partners maybe you're on a team of five but now in coming soon maybe that team of five you don't need to find that fifth person or that fourth person maybe there's an AI engine that's running similar to the human capability and you're actually playing with a simulated player right from teams so there's in that require opens up a whole new area of processing for the games and then I think for AR and BR AR is a little further out than VR err requires some more advancements with respect to optics and so forth VR is taking you know high-end displays and AI and graphics kind of packaging it all into one to really change the paradigm of how you interact with the computer how does 5g change things is it is it as much of a game changer as people think or is there just so much data that it sort of allows us to keep pace I wonder if you can talk about 5g yeah so so you know every ten years or so there's a G transition 3G and 99 4G in 2009 now 5g in 2019 so it's not a ten-year cadence and every time when you have a G transition you couple that with a transition in computing and it changes the paradigm so what's gonna happen is 5g is gonna bring a lot more capacity a lot lower latency at the same time AI is coming in and that together is going to create a pretty powerful platform for applications for the future and then of course there's just so much more data now how do you guys keep because the you mentioned you know you've been talking to the to the street and you mentioned this morning that the the rate of bit density that is is moderating so how do you guys keep up where are your investments that allow you to keep pace yeah I mean we have a so just maybe a little bit of comment on 5g I think as the bandwidth to the device gets faster and faster there's more and more data that comes in that you can imagine for example one of the things people out of people like to do you know is to you know download content if you look at Netflix if you look at Amazon Prime if you look at even DirecTV and I have all of those you can actually download the content now and watch them offline so as it happens and that content gets to be 4k and an even higher frame rates the amount of storage that's needed to download that is getting more and more like you know you know my wife upgraded her phone the other day and the first thing she said is I want an entire Netflix season on my phone when I'm in the gym so so you know there's simple things like that I've changed a lot you know that's one of the reasons why the storage is getting so much now when you go to 5g and the download speed gets higher you can download like a 4k video really quickly now you got to put it somewhere after you downloaded so that's actually driving the need for this so before people wouldn't like download a 4k video because where would you put it so as we increase storage that kind of stuff comes really fast because you couldn't you know take a long time to download before so as the bandwidth gets higher the storage requirements the memory requirements are getting higher now what we are doing on that front is we're investing a lot you know as Sanjay and Scott talked earlier both in our fab capacity is both in our technology transitions we have a lot of new interesting technologies like new emerging memories they're actually like 3d crosspoint we talked about that kind of blur the line between storage and memory so there's a lot of new interesting technologies that will actually take advantage of that super exciting time so going back to the image processing side of that one of the trends it seems to me is that the processing is going further and further to the edge itself and going inside the camera itself do you talk a little bit about that and what it's going to take to to put that that your memory technology or bandwidth right inside the camera itself sure so so there's no doubt that you want to maximize the capability on the edge as a first step and then you want to reduce the late as much as possible to the cloud as a second step so on the edge you know if you had something for example if I'm taking a picture of you and I want face recognition I don't want to take every frame and send it up to the clouds I'm gonna waste bandwidth so on I want that capability on device and that's true for a variety of different applications you want to maximize the capability on device and then focus on the fast connection so the cloud and the device from a latency and bandwidth perspective are much tightly more tightly coupled you know you think about the evolution of computing you know obviously everything was centralized and then you know pcs the world was about pcs back then it was kind of the the centralization with it was a bit blip on the screen compared to the pcs was everything remember that and then of course mobile drove cloud through the roof and now with the edge and cloud and and mobile you're seeing just this ubiquitous capability that senses now you bring in AI you bring in machine intelligence it what do you guys envision for the for the next 10 years in terms of what the world looks like centralized decentralized distributed intelligent I mean it's just mind-boggling what's your vision well I think if you look at client devices client devices certainly generate a lot of data maybe we get a little bit of data from a sensor and a bridge but maybe we'll get a lot of data from the car traveling across that bridge and what you need to do is you need to make sense of that data locally and then transmit it back to the cloud so you want the cloud to have the most useful data or sorted data right data that can then improve you know automated driving or reduce traffic accidents and so forth but you don't want all the data sent there so what's gonna happen is on the edge there's literally you know a device is going from smartphones where there's about one and a half billion a year to billions even trillions of IOT connected devices any device that has a computing element also is can have a connectivity element also is going to have an AI element so it's gonna be a much more connected world as opposed to just connected people yeah I mean I think kids keep explained it very well you know you know if you step back a little bit I think that the history of technology and evolution has been very similar right in industry for a while but we all remember the times when we said we just did month one mainframe and everyone needs dumb terminals right then we went on to say hey you know what I think distributed computing with everyone having a pcs that I think you do now we are back to maybe we should have everything in the cloud and the edge devices so I actually think in a world goes cyclical and the more you do at the edge the more it drives the need for the cloud and we call it the virtuous cycle and I think the best way to think about it is you want the HD devices to send information not data which means they need to be for data needs to be processed with memory and compute to become information and then you send the information to the edge yeah I guess my point was that you know I've been around a while too and you're going to see the pendulum swing I feel like the pendulum is not swinging anymore it's just exploded inside it's really an exciting time in our industry guys thanks very much for coming thank you appreciate thank you all right keep right there everybody we'll be back at micron insight from the Embarcadero you're watching the cube right back [Music]

New Orleans Louisiana it that you covering dot next conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix welcome back to the cubes coverage here of Nutanix next 2018 here in New Orleans Louisiana the brass bands are going talking to lots of customers been a great event so far and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu minimun we always love to be able to talk to customers each one of them has a different story different analysis different challenges they're facing happened to welcome Alex Walker who's the senior vice president of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas thanks so much for joining us thank you alright so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keys first one who's been getting getting the inaugural visit here but first of all tell us about yourself a little bit of background what you run at the bank and just give us quick sketch of the bank oh let's start with the bank you know we're in our 51st year we are based in Laredo Texas and it's a community bank mostly and commercial right you know where we are 19th according to Forbes magazine best banks in the country so we went up from 46 to 19 this year Congrats and so great accomplishments for the bank itself it's a great operation we're in 88 cities in the in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 billion in assets great and what's under your purview as the SPID okay so you an all IT for the bank I'm not this not the development side of it you know without the operations infrastructure yes okay 51 year old company finance going through a lot of changes before we get in to the tech just give us one or two some of those the stresses and strains that you're feeling is business well regulation is one right over the last several years the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing Keith Kountz rates at Department and a lot of cost to the bank I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change right potentially hoping for some change in them in the regulatory climate and so forth but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth so we we need to take a look at our infrastructure of everything across the board yeah maybe could organizationally where does that pension for change come from what kind of air cover do you get from from News exercise what's of the staff underneath you know how do they take change well initially there was a lot of reluctance right people were in the status quo they're comfortable with what they had not necessarily happy with it but taking on change is it's difficult right so we looked at operational costs some of the basic things we had two data centers at the time literally a hundred and fifty yards apart from each other so we said we can do we can do more right the bank's motto is we do more and so we said how do we do more for the bank for their customers improve the quality of the services the uptime and so and and reduce its cost so it's your bank so change in a bank a lot of times means going from one store to reef vendor to another storage or a vendor and that's a big deal big set of conversations you know your your your you know it we are sitting at the 19th best bank and then the fourteenth you don't get there by turning over the table part called the table you your get you get there by being steady what made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change well when we looked at the infrastructure that we had and you know it goes back to simon Sinek start with quiet right why are we doing this I asked I asked the my department when I first started who are our competitors and they gave us the names of all the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects the large banks and I said no they're not that's the bank's customers our competitors are AWS Rackspace Microsoft is your Google Cloud it's the these are the hosting companies we host applications for our customers we're shared services for our bank once we understand who we are then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing right some unit I'm getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind we're not cost-effective we're not competitive so it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide so from a validation perspective it you start to look at the cost of hyper-converged in general I'm sorry how long you guys have been a new tennis customer three years okay so from a cost perspective as you start to look at hyper-converged how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment well I looked I looked at the the studies that are out there particular there was an IDC study done member on 2015 that said that customers of like size all different types of customers we're getting these these benefits I said wow if I could get those that'd be really cool right so I went to the board I went to my boss the CIO and I said I think we could get this this would be a really good but then again people said we never heard of mechanics what is this our applications aren't certified with Nutanix you know so let's talk about procurements and I said well let's just do a PLC and that's bringing this in and and we'll run VMware on it which is what we were certified at the time our applications and I said let's let's look at this infrastructure this we brought in the PLC but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting the bank's accounting department right we all know we all work for accountants eventually and so we said if we can get them to agree that if we can get these then they're gonna be behind us from the are white and TCO models right so we went through and said what are we paying for this what are we paying for that what's the hyung going rates for this let's get some samples of if we ordered this and replace it we had eleven storage frames from seven different vendors or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had over time acquired a lot of different frames and like most places never retired them right and so all that layer of complexity what we did is we said this on this PLC let's test this out okay cut to the chase we we got the we got the numbers we were then three or two 5% of everything that came out in that study and so we bought that that that equipment immediately placed our first order which was 12 notes still want to keep it constrained so one of food in the water but I said this is a technology I'm betting on five years we'll write it off in five years we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing what happened was we were getting so such good wins we actually completed in our five-year model we completed that in roughly around two years because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth we were able to to accelerate that not only that we just finished upgrading our D our site which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that and so within three years we've now are our 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes which we're going to put out in our branch operations that'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our for AIX system yeah Alex can you tell us what what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some TCO studies you actually presented here at the conference what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this well for one and a big one was licensing right it's far more efficient what we got for example we got we were able to take our Fibre Channel switches running about quarter of a million plus each and and get rid of those would we when we look at it the bandwidth that that's taken on the servers it's writing data to storage going through this storage controller going into this the sand and coming back that delay was substantial so much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture did what was the business response on this did it change anything in the business what did the users say well when they'd users Jobs ran far faster than they did before when we went back and said I don't need as many Microsoft sequel licenses as they did before for consolidation fewer cores the tremendous benefits our sequel developed our sequel management team for example it takes far less time to stand up servers do migrations things like that so what's the Delta between the prediction debrief their predicted ROI and the realized our ROI you guys realize your savings much quicker wolves worldwide little surprises well the surprises were we were conservative we didn't include any soft costs those are difficult to we missed it me Steve Kaplan are all are all I got a TCO guy for Nutanix go back and forth on the soft cost don't show weak soft cost show me where I can give the money back to my accountants who we all have to report to correct right yeah so what we found is the fact that we were conservative we were getting much better benefits so again when we look at the servers we bought too many cores right so now I this good problem now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin so the time the technology to the financial benefits the reduction and latency allows you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need less latency equals better performance better performance tools more dense newness Lourdes units means less money spent so we we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center and it's we're running somewhere around up third a little bit more than a third of that data center so the electrical expend is down in aggregate roughly around 40% so that's real money okay you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery tell us what led to that that's a newer solution from Nutanix how that experience go we're using the note annex replication for that and when we our legacy was that some of them were taped and some of it was you know migrating data you know a typical older dr type of situation we're in our testing now and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that dr site from production but we're mirroring the the systems exactly as they are in production so when you spin it up its life right so we have to build a barrier between those systems so if we take that even then taking that into account we can get it up in hours rather than and when we say hours like a couple of hours rather than the 22 12 to 24 hours that we were before and it's 10 systems not 4 systems so roughly about a hundred servers or so minimally all right Alex look forward a little bit tell us what's on your roadmap what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with titanic's there we're looking at VDI for example something that we now that we've reengineering our network as well that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security right but looking forward into AI and and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions okay you mentioned blockchain so definitely need to get get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the Bakke standpoint cryptocurrency of course will I and I do pay taxes on it but realistically I'm mining with you know for video carts it's it's not it's really understand from as a chief technologist I'm I really need to understand these things you don't make appendix fluster off on the side I did ask her I could have the old data center and the when we're doing I'm doing that really effectively to better understand that but I think what we're looking at it blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on block chains and they're they're bringing it up in their ten cases potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new you know new competition in the market right so we take that to kind of mean that they're they're thinking about the same things we are so keep a eye on to the future especially when it comes to something like blockchain this relatively inefficient at processing transactions how does that impact your data center strategy you guys just went down from you know huge space reduced electrical power by 40% any considerations around kind of the blood blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy we're a conservative bank so would we we're having discussions about what what does that mean right what it were do we think that's might come in and it's very early for us right we've been busy you know the datacenter moves and other types of things too so we're starting to look at that and have some a few conversations about what do we think it it is we're talking to some of our our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do excuse me to use some of this blockchain technology it's a it's a different way of doing it you know when in the past we might use relational databases like sequel server or something to do something some of this work where distributed ledger might be a far easier better way to do that so it's another tool I like to say that you know video didn't kill the radiostar right yeah there's more type of radio out there than there ever was so this is another tool that we have to look and say well how does this how do we utilize this what with the right technology for the right job and we're being very cautious about that all right well Alex Walker really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing you more than ten echoes in the future for Keith Townsend Thomas do minimun more coverage here at Nutanix duck necks New Orleans thanks for watching the queue [Music]

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Fortinet Accelerate18. Brought to you buy Fortinet. (upbeat digital music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host Peter Burris, and we are now joined by the CISO of Ingram Micro Kevin Kealy. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you both very much. It's nice to be here. >> I love your title, the Prince of Security Weirdness, your other title. >> Yeah, right. >> Tell us about where you got that and why you like it. >> I was at a customer engagement years ago, when I was working for AT&T, in of all places, Moline, Illinois, and I was working with a lady whose business card actually said Protocol Princess. And the customers, based on what we were actually there to do, the customer decided that if she was the Protocol Princess, then I had to be the Prince of Security Weirdness, because the problem ended up being a combination of something very odd that was happening with their security appliances plus the network itself. And so, of course she spread that when we got back to the office and it just kind of stuck from thereon. I kind of like it. If a company found something weird that was going on with security, they'd just go, "Send him, he'll sort it out." And I did. >> So you've seen probably a really interesting evolution of security. >> Kevin: Oh yeah. >> You've been the CISO for almost a couple years. >> Kevin: Yep, almost two years, yeah. Longest tenured one in a while, I think. >> And you have an interesting kind of strategic perspective. Tell us a little bit about that and what makes that unique. >> Sure, so from a CISO perspective it used to be the CISO was the C-E NO. You know, the place where business goes to die. My feeling is, if I'm not adding lift to the business, then I'm adding drag. And if you're adding drag then you're not being a responsible custodian of the company's money or it's direction. So my feeling is, and my strategic objective is, always partner with business to help them achieve what they need to achieve, but to do it safely and in a way that doesn't add risk to the company. So, I like to say you look through your lens at something, it looks ridiculous. Somebody's doing something truly stupid. But if you pivot your perspective and you look at what they're doing it for, they have a perfectly reasonable and rational expectation of their results and what they're trying to achieve. What you need to do is to adjust your thinking to understand what you currently don't understand in order to pivot them to get to a safe perspective, and therefore business. >> So one of the key differences between business and digital business, is the role that data plays. But we could also take a security perspective. Business was about securing and limiting access. Digital business is about sharing and making possible access. >> Kevin: Right. >> So is that kind of what you mean when you say that you're not the C-NO? You're not the C-YES necessarily, but you're really focused on how to appropriately share? >> Completely agree. My approach is always, let's consult with each other, tell me what you're trying to achieve and let's not look at what's caused me to be in your business today, let's look at what you're trying to achieve. What's your end goal? Right, now let's work together to achieve that in a way that adds limited... 'cuz you can't ever have a solution that exposes stuff without adding any risk,. But there's always an acceptable risk appetite that you have to maintain in order to do business, right? With risk comes opportunity and reward, right? So you can never eliminate all risk. So my approach is, understand what they're trying to do. Look at how much risk there is in any different way of doing it, and then choose the way that offers you the most risk reduction for the least capital expenditure and operational expenditure. And gets them to market the quickest. At that point now, I know I've done my responsible part of keeping risk under control. I maintain a risk register, tells me as a whole the company has accepted this much risk. If we do this extra thing, this might put you over what you, the board of directors and management have accepted before. Let's see what we can do to reign that back in here. I have a solution here that's nearly what you want, will that do? You know, another mantra I cite is, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Too many of my peers in the CISO realm keep chasing perfection. You know they see NIST 800 as an achievable goal. They see, you know, total PCI compliance as an achievable goal. My feeling is, as soon as you get to the point where you are PCI compliant, and you still have things to do, then you need to start concentrating on other more risky things that are going on in your business. You can never achieve NIST 800 unless you have a government's funding. I don't know too many CISOs who have a government's funding, right? So my feeling is never let good enough fail to be good enough. Achieve good enough then go and solve other riskier things, and then come back, maybe in a year, couple of years, when it's time to refresh that solution, and see if now that's not good enough anymore. Maybe you need to do something different. But in all cases I'm partnering with business to make sure that whatever I'm doing is adding lift for them, not drag. >> So, Ingram Micro, we just had Eric Kohl on a little bit ago. So Ingram's been a partner with Fortinet for 10 years or so, but you, on your side and your CISO role, are a customer of Fortinet. >> Kevin: Absolutely. >> So in the last couple of years when you came on board, some of the things I'm hearing that you're talking about, sounds like potentially a cultural shift. Talk to us about maybe some of the weirdness that you found in from a security perspective, and how Fortinet is helping you guys on the Ingram, achieve security transformations so that you can evolve. >> Sure, so, Fortinet's been a great partner for me. They have a truly wonderful suite of products. I mean, everything from the edge protection for the dissolving perimeter, all the way out to small and SOHO type firewalls. And then we have wireless access points that are strong and well fortified with the ability to separate between multiple networks, all the way down to FortiDB, which I use to protect our databases. So we do our database monitoring for our critical databases. As a suite of things that I can manage with one console, it helps me minimize the number of operational staff and the operational training they have to do. And then, from my perspective as a customer, Fortinet's always there for me. I know that I can just call them, and within five minutes somebody's calling me back and we can get the right resources right on the phone. That kind of partnership, you can't put a price on that. You know, everybody's at some point in their lives, bought a product that's failed, and then you can't get any customer support on it, and eventually you have to toss it out. Fortinet's always there for me. They're always checking to make sure that we're doing the right thing. And to give you an example of how Fortinet is part of our company fabric, and I use the word in both it's terms, we chose Fortinet gear to protect our CEO's house. Alright? Our CEO, of course, has a lot of, you know, he's a high net worth individual. He has a lot of high value assets that he takes home to work from home. You know he's clearly a target. So for protecting his home and infrastructure there, we deployed Fortinet gear. >> That's a very interesting use case. >> Yeah, and all my staff, including myself, we have Fortinet gear at home as well. So this is the stuff we trust to protect ourselves, when we're in our most vulnerable environment. A lot of people don't think about that. You take these well secured devices and you take them outside the company perimeter. Now they're on their own. You know, if you can take them to a safe environment though, it makes them a lot safer. From an engagement perspective, as the buyer of things for a company like Ingram, one of the first partnerships I made when I first joined the company was with Eric. Because I want to make sure that I'm supporting our sales side as well. So if anybody comes to me and says, "Hey, I have the perfect solution for you." The very first question I ask them is, "Are you a re-seller with us?" And if the answer is no, it's like, call this guy. This Eric Kohl chap, he'll be able to have a very interesting conversation with you. So, Fortinet being such a long-term partner with Ingram, it's an easy purchasing decision for me. Number one on the technology side. Number on on the partner side. You know what that old story is, nobody got fired for buying IBM? At Ingram, nobody got fired for buying Fortinet gear. And it helps that it's the best on the books, for me anyway, for the stuff that I use it for. I'm very excited about the new Fabric. >> Tell us about that, from a visibility perspective internally, complexity, mitigation standpoint, TCO. How is that going to help you at Ingram? >> So, you said the word, visibility. One of the first things I did when I got to Ingram, was I realized I couldn't see all the way to the edges and to the bottom of my network. So I started to increase the visibility with a combination of the Fortinet product suite, I think I'll be able to get the edge-to-edge, top-to-bottom visibility. And I'm really excited about the web-based CASD solution. 'Cuz what I really don't want to do, and one of the talks this morning, the keynote was talking about it, is the vendor, just the vendor pile of different things that have to be managed. All the different people we have to get training from. All of the currency that you have to maintain. If I can manage it all through one console, And I only have to train my staff in one suite of products, that makes the overall work that they do that much simpler to execute. And I love the concept of being able to make those contextual rules. You know, if this device is in this class then don't let it go over to this data that's in this class. That's so simple to describe. And I love the fact that you can then orchestrate that deployment. So when as we go to a virtualized environment, and we roll into cloud and so on, being able to push a policy like that and being able to push that context is going to be so exciting for me. >> One of the challenges of integration is that you get dependencies. >> Yes. >> So as a CISO, and you start looking at a fabric, and as you said, it's a very rich fabric, it does a lot of work. How do you ensure that you don't find, 'cuz if there's a vulnerability inside the fabric, then the whole fabric gets affected. So what is that trade-off between integration and dependency for you? >> So, that's a great question. Back in 1998,'99, I was at AT&T during what was, it became known as the Great Frame Relay Outage, that AT&T had. Many people will remember that. >> Not to laugh at you. >> Do you remember it, though? >> I do remember it. >> Right? >> Kevin: And the cause of that was, the company was entirely CISCO on the back burner. I was one of the engineers that was there trying to fix it all. CISCO had a self-deploying patch protocol where you drop a patch onto a device and it would automatically push the patch to all its neighboring devices and so on. Well you dropped the patch on this device, it would push the patch towards its neighbors, then it would crash and reboot. But it had already had time to push the patch to all its neighbors. So one by one, every single router and switch in the entire network, received a patch and then crashed and rebooted. And that became a three-week problem known as The Great Frame Relay Outage of 1998. So at that point, our then CISO, Edward Amoroso, he decided that we wanted vendor diversity in our network. And at AT&T at the time, then, we went to CISCO on the edge, Juniper in the core. And the reason was, we wanted the network to be able to stay up and routing, even if we has a problem on the edge. And of course, automatic patch push protocol was disabled. (laughing) From my perspective, I think, there's a fine line to be managed here. Southwest Airlines has made a very concrete and a very risky, but certainly it's worked out for them right now, decision. All their aircraft are Boeing 737s. So they only have to train their maintenance staff to maintain one airplane. All their pilots can fly all their airplanes. >> Lisa: My brother's a pilot for them, yes. >> Right? >> Yeah. >> Kevin: All of them are 737s, but if the FAA grounds 737s, all of Southwest is out of business, for the duration of the flying ban, right? So Southwest has decided they don't need vendor diversity across their fleet. I know they bought Allegiant, and that's got a number of Boeing aircraft, however, from the perspective of their original business plan, all 737s because they now have a very, very well defined TCO. From my perspective I think, there's a line to be drawn here, but Fortinet has me covered. They have their APIs. They work with the other vendors. So if I have a SIM or a log manager or something like Splunk deployed, they already have that partnership in place. It means they can manage the data within the device as though it's my own data, as though it's within the Fortinet Fabric. And that then keeps me happy. Because I then get the benefits of the additional features perhaps that I would get from a Splunk rather than a Fortinet tool, but I also get the vendor diversity that's there. See Splunk for me is not just a security tool, it's a VI tool and there are many other groups that are leveraging the capabilities that it has. So for me, if I went to something like the Fortinet SIM, that would be a very selfish solution. It would be just a security thing. That's not really partnering with business. My investment in Splunk, I've got six other groups within the company leveraging it, and I just invited the seventh one in today. Now those people are all using Splunk for their own things. I'm footing the bill for them so they get all this VI for free. That's been a real big win for me, because I'm now known as the guy that's providing stuff that the company can actually use. That's a very powerful position to be in as the CISO because when I come asking for something that normally they would've said no to, all I have to do is remind them, "Hey, you know you're using my Splunk solution? "Well now, would you mind helping me out? "I need you to do this thing "with your laptops in your organization." And they're much more receptive because they know of me as a partner. >> So would you say, one of the things we were talking about a number of times today, Peter, with guests, is getting, how, does a CISO get this, well maybe it's enable the balance, at the speed at which a business needs to transform digitally to be profitable and grow and compete and manage that with risk? Where do you think that your are on getting that balance? Sounds like there's a lot of collaboration within what you've been able to achieve. >> So, there's a couple of rules that I go with. The first is I go meet the business leaders and introduce myself. And I say, I know you may have heard this before, but this time I mean it, I'm here to help. Tell me what your pain points are. How can I help you, right? And that's a very powerful question. I always try to end every meeting with "How can I help you?" Alright. If you end the meeting with that question, that last memory they have of you will be, you were offering to help last time I saw you. I'm willing to give you another audience. And then, it's by action. Like my Splunk investment. I invested in it, and now other people are using it. I'm showing by my actions that I'm actually not just all talk. And other people have noticed. They would come to one of my predecessors and say, "Hey, I want to do X." and they would be told straight out, "No." My answer is always, okay. How are you planning to do it? Something brought you here today. Let's talk about it. And then when they show me how they are planning to do it, it's like, you know what, I see opportunity here. You guys can do it in three fewer steps and at significantly less risk if you just let me help you in this area, and then we do it this way, and we use this tool that I've already bought and you don't have to pay for. Now all of a sudden they've got a yes. It's already through. It's through architecture review. They've got the solution in place, but I get the logs and I get to put my own encryption solution in or whatever else it is, and I get to absorb the risk for the company. And again, it's all by actions too. You know, if you make sure that you never say the word no. People say, "No, because." Try to change it to, "Yes, and." And by pivoting the conversation that way all of a sudden people aren't arguing with you. They're trying to sell you something. And when somebody's trying to sell you something and you're buying it now you've got the upper hand, right? So now I'm the buyer. Right, it's like, "Let's buy it, but let's do it like this." >> So I have another question for you. Something that's related to one of the conversations that we've had many times today. I'm going to paint a scenario for you. A CEO is sitting in front of a group of investors. And talking about strategic flexibility and the things that their assets allows her to do. My balance sheet will allow us to do this. My sales force will allow us to do this. When are we going to see the first CEO say, "My security, my digital security, "will allow us to do this, "things that our competitors can't do." >> That's an excellent question, I hope it's soon. I'd like to be right in the vanguard of that. Ingram Micro already uses us as an enabler. >> I'm sorry, what was that? >> Ingram Micro already uses me and my group as an enabler. This year we've been able to negotiate a reduction in our corporate insurance rates, for cyber risk, simply because I was able to show the value in what we've achieved over the last two years. And show how materially we've affected the company's risk envelope and our acceptance of risk. So by doing that, I've already added value to the bottom line because insurance costs money and it's a dead sunk cost, right? So I've already reduced the cost of that. So now all of a sudden I'm enabling the business. And I'm also meaning that we can actually uplift our coverage too, so now we're reducing risk even more. We can displace more risk to the outside of the business. This conversation with Eric, you know, I'm about to award an RFP. Before I award an RFP, I'll go and see Eric. Is there a strategic reason for me to award it to this vendor or this other vendor? Now of course we're negotiating on the sale side and the buy side together. That's a very powerful story. So certainly at Ingram, I think I'm already partnering with the business in such a way that we can make that a compelling message. In terms of the overall industry, I really hope that it'll be soon. I think the CISO and the CIO roles are merging together. I think as the CIO is rolling less hardware and is rolling more into virtual and policy and direction and technology choices, I think people are going to have to realize that security has to be built into that. Because if you try to bake it on later, or bolt it on, it's never as effective. It's always more expensive. You look at something like the Fortinet Fabric, you roll that as part of your orchestrated virtual environment, you've turned the whole attack chain on it's head, now. Now it's going to cost so much to try and compromise any part of that infrastructure, you're going to see it so quickly, you've turned it all around. Now it's way too expensive to try and attack companies with that kind of fabric. Now the boot is on the foot. Okay, so invent something I can't see. You know, we've got contextual threat intelligence here, that's able to spot patterns. We've got polyform on the outside here. Everything's working in concert, okay. >> So you're not worried about being put out of a job any time soon. >> I think sadly this job is around for a while. I used to joke that it was Bill Gates and his company that provided us with permanent job security. Now it's the cyber criminals. I tell you what though, today the simplest attacks are still the ones that work. It's phishing, phishing, phishing, phishing, phishing. People clicking on links. >> Human beings. >> Human beings are always easier to hack than computers. >> So you've given us, last question as we have a minute or so left, you've given us a great perspective of the impact that you've been able to make using Fortinet on the customer side. You talk to a lot of partners in Ingram's ecosystem. How do you impart your wisdom and your expertise on the partners from that enablement, such so that they can go and talk to customers and really share best practices from the CISO suite? >> So again, I partner with Eric's cybersecurity advisory committee, where he has a number of our key security partners who come along. And for two years running now, I've participated. I've spoken. I spent two days with those folks. I'll answer any question they have. I'll spend the evenings with them. We'll have a beer together. And I'll do a panel and I'll have discussions just like this with them. And share with them some of the things that I've done with the company that have worked, and some of the things that haven't worked out quite so well. No holds barred. I'm a big believer in herd immunity. You know, it's an old joke, you don't want to be the fastest antelope, but you sure as hell don't want to be the slowest one either. So from my perspective, the more of us that share that kind of intel, the easier things will be as we go forward. Because together as a herd we'll be more immune. So from my perspective, even if it's a competitor's CISO, I'll still sit down, have a coffee with them and chat with them. And it will be very much open kimono. Because I feel like we can never share enough of this intelligence with each other. We're not seeking to gain a competitive advantage individually. We're seeking to make the field and the companies, and if you like, the white hats, less vulnerable. And I think that's a compelling value message. >> I noticed your clothes. I guess you're an All Blacks fan? >> Well, you know, being South African I have to be a Springboks, but, uh, you know, it was such a sad day when Jonha Lumo died. That was such a sad day. I got to meet him once and he was a mountain of a man, but such a gentleman. Yep, that was good. But yes, rugby is definitely my sport, so thank you. >> Well, Kevin, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights, what you've been able to achieve on the consumer side, or consuming Fortinet's technology and what you're able to impart on your partners. We wish you great success in 2018 and look forward to having you back on the show. >> That sounds great, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, it's been a great pleasure, thanks. >> Excellent. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE from Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Peter Burris, after this short break we will be right back. (upbeat digital music)

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