(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live coverage here in Las Vegas for Amazon re:Invent 2018. Day three, we're winding down over 150 videos. We'll have over 500 clips. Losing the voice. Dave Vellante, my co-host. Suzi analyst tech that we're going to extract theCUBE insights, James Kobielus. David Floyer from Wikibon. Jim you've been prolific on the blogs, Siliconangle.com, great stories. David you've got some research. What's your take? Jim, you're all over what's going on in the news. What's the impact? >> Well I think what this years re:Invent shows is that AWS is doubling down on A.I. If you look at the sheer range of innovative A.I. capabilities they've introduced into their portfolio, in terms of their announcements, it's really significant. A. They have optimized tense or flow for their cloud. B. They now have an automated labeling, called Ground Truth, labeling capability that leverages mechanical turf, which has been an Amazon capability for a while. They've also got now the industries first, what's called reinforcement learning plug-in to their data science tool chain, in this case Sage Maker, reinforcement learning is becoming so important for robotics, and gaming, and lots of other applications of A.I., and I'm just scratching the surface. So they've announced a lot of things, and David can discuss other things, but I'm seeing the depth of A.I. Their investment in it shows that they've really got their fingers on what enterprises are doing, and will be doing to differentiate themselves with this technology over the next five to ten years. >> What's an area that you see that people are getting? Clearly A.I. What areas are people missing that's compelling that you've observed here? >> When you say people are missing, you mean the general...? >> Journalists. >> Oh. >> Audience. There's so much news. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Where are the nuggets that are hidden in the news? (laughing) What are you seeing that people might not see that's different? >> Getting back to the point I was raising, which is that robotics is becoming a predominant application realm for A.I. Robotics, outside the laboratory, or outside of the industrial I.O.T., robots are coming into everything, and there's a special type of A.I. you build into robots, re-enforcement learning is a big part of it. So I think the general, if you look at the journalists, they've missed the fact that I've seen in the past couple of years, robotics and re-enforcement learning are almost on the verge of being mainstream in the space, and AWS gets it. Just the depth of their investments. Like Deep Racer, that cute little autonomous vehicle that they rolled out here at this event, that just shows that they totally get it. That will be a huge growth sector. >> David Floyer, outpost is their on premises cloud. You've been calling this for I don't know how many years, >> (laughing) Three years. >> Three years? >> Yeah. What's the impact? >> And people said, no way Foyer's wrong (laughing). >> So you get vindication but... >> And people, in particular in AWS. (laughing) >> So you're right. So you're right, but is it going to be out in a year? >> Yeah, next in 2019. >> Will this thing actually make it to the market? And if it does what is the impact? Who wins and who loses? >> Well let's start with will it get to the market? Absolutely. It is outposts, AWS Outposts, is the name. It is taking AWS in the cloud and putting it on premise. The same API's. The same services. It'll be eventually identical between the two. And that has enormous increase in the range, and the reach that AWS and the time that AWS can go after. It is a major, major impact on the marketplace, puts pressure on a whole number of people, the traditional vendors who are supplying that marketplace of the moment, and in my opinion it's going to be wildly successful. People have been waiting that, wanting that, particularly in the enterprise market. They reasons for it are simple. Latency, low latency, you've got to have the data and the compute very close together. Moving data is very, very expensive over long distances, and the third one is many people want, or need to have the data in certain places. So the combination is meeting the requirements, they've taken a long time to get there. I think it's going to be, however wildly successful. It's going to be coming out in 2019. They'll have their alpha, their betas in the beginning of it. They'll have some announcements, probably about mid 2019. >> Who's threatened by this? Everybody? Cisco? HP? Dell? >> The integration of everything, storage, networking, compute, all in the same box is obviously a threat to all suppliers within that. And their going to have to adapt to that pretty strongly. It's going to be a declining market. Declining markets are good if you adapt properly. A lot of people make a lot of money from, like IBM, from mainframe. >> It's a huge threat to IBM. >> You're playing it safe. You're not naming names. (laughing) Okay, I'll rephrase. What's your prediction? >> What's my prediction on? >> Of the landscape after this is wildly successful. >> The landscape is that the alternatives is going to be a much, much smaller pie, and only those that have volume, and only those that can adapt to that environment are going to survive. >> Well, and let's name names. So who's threatened by this? Clearly Dell, EMC, is threatened by this. >> HP. >> HP, New Tanix, the VX rat guys, Lenovo is in there. Are they wiped out? No, but they have to respond. How do they respond? >> They have to respond, yeah. They have to have self service. They have to have utility pricing. They have to connect to the cloud. So either they go hard after AWS, connecting AWS, or they belly up to Microsoft >> With Azure Stack, >> Microsoft Azure. that's clearly going to be their fallback place, so in a way, Microsoft with Azure Stack is also threatened by this, but in a way it's goodness for them because the ecosystem is going to evolve to that. So listen, these guys don't just give up. >> No, no I know. >> They're hard competitors, they're fighters. It's also to me a confirmation of Oracle's same same strategy. On paper Oracle's got that down, they're executing on that, even though it's in a narrow Oracle world. So I think it does sort of indicate that that iPhone for the enterprise strategy is actually quite viable. If I may jump in here, four things stood out to me. The satellite as a service, was to me amazing. What's next? Amazon with scale, there's just so many opportunities for them. The Edge, if we have time. >> I was going to talk about the Edge. >> Love to talk about the Edge. The hybrid evolution, and Open Source. Amazon use to make it easy for the enterprise players to complete. They had limited sales and service capabilities, they had no Open Source give back, they were hybrid deniers. Everything's going to go into the public cloud. That's all changed. They're making it much, much more difficult, for what they call the old guard, to compete. >> So that same way the objection? >> Yeah, they're removing those barriers, those objections. >> Awesome. Edge. >> Yeah, and to comment on one of the things you were talking about, which is the Edge, they have completely changed their approach to the Edge. They have put in Neo as part of Sage Maker, which allows them to push out inference code, and they themselves are pointing out that inference code is 90% of all the compute, into... >> Not the training. >> Not the training, but the inference code after that, that's 90% of the compute. They're pushing that into the devices at the Edge, all sorts of architectures. That's a major shift in mindset about that. >> Yeah, and in fact I was really impressed by Elastic Inference for the same reasons, because it very much is a validation of a trend I've been seeing in the A.I. space for the last several years, which is, you can increasingly build A.I. in your preferred visual, declarative environment with Python code, and then the abstraction layers of the A.I. Ecosystem have developed to a point where, the ecosystem increasingly will auto-compile to TensorFlow, or MXNet, or PyTorch, and then from there further auto-compile your deployed trained model to the most efficient format for the Edge device, for the GP, or whatever. Where ever it's going to be executed, that's already a well established trend. The fact that AWS has productized that, with this Elastic Inference in their cloud, shows that not only do they get that trend, they're just going to push really hard. I'm making sure that AWS, it becomes in many ways, the hub of efficient inferencing for everybody. >> One more quick point on the Edge, if I may. What's going on on the Edge reminds me of the days when Microsoft was trying to take Windows and stick it on mobile. Right, the windows phone. Top down, I.T. guys coming at it, >> Oh that's right. >> and that's what a lot of people are doing today in IT. It's not going to work. What Amazon is doing see, we're going to build an environment that you can build applications on, that are secure, you can manage them from a bottoms up approach. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Identifying what the operations technology developers want. Giving them the tools to do that. That's a winning strategy. >> And focusing on them producing the devices, not themselves. >> Right. >> And not declaring where the boundaries are. >> Spot on. >> Very very important. >> Yep. >> And they're obviously inferencing, you get most value out of the data if you put that inferencing as close as you possibly can to that data, within a camera, is in the camera itself. >> And I eluded to it earlier, another key announcement from AWS here is, first of all the investment in Sage Maker itself is super impressive. In the year since they've introduced it, look at they've already added, they have that slide with all the feature enhancements, and new modules. Sage Maker Ground Truth, really important, the fully managed service for automating labeling of training datasets, using Mechanical Turk . The vast majority of the costs in a lot of A.I. initiatives involves human annotators of training data, and without human annotated training data you can't do supervised learning, which is the magic on a lot of A.I, AWS gets the fact that their customers want to automate that to the nth degree. Now they got that. >> We sound like Fam boys (laughing). >> That's going to be wildly popular. >> As we say, clean data makes good M.L., and good M.L. makes great A.I. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So you don't want any dirty data out there. Cube, more coverage here. Cube insights panel, here in theCUBE at re:Invent. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)