 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Brian Cox. He is the Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, thanks for having me, Rebecca and Stu. It's good to see you again, so. Yes, you're a CUBE alum, a skewed CUBE alum. I've been here before, and it's a great experience. Great, great. Well, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how Nutanix really pioneered hyper-converged infrastructure. Right. But the vision is bigger. Nutanix is about more than hyper-converged. Well, and yeah, and we're very actually glad to see here at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft and the next version of Windows is touting the whole hyper-converged concept. So we are seeing validation from one of the most established computing companies in the world. The thing is that when Nutanix got started, we didn't even know what to call it. We never used the term hyper-converged infrastructure. It was one of your colleagues in the analyst community that coined that term. We were really thinking of something, I think, bigger and beyond, which is how can we simplify IT? Because at the end of the day, all the business cares about are the services that IT delivers. Those get delivered through applications. Everything below that, frankly, the business doesn't care. Right? If you're a donut company, you want to make donuts. If you're a shipping company, you want to have trucks and all that, logistics to be optimal. IT and finance and marketing and HR, they're all just means to an end. And so when we looked at this, we said, what can we do to just deliver those services and apps and simplify everything else? Anything that we can do to save time, that we can save money, we get to return that back to the business to help be a better trucking company or a better donut company. Right? So with that in mind, we said we need to simplify. Brian, a great point. I mean, your background, my background, we're on the infrastructure side of things. I got reminded many times in my career, look, the whole goal of infrastructure is to make those apps run. You know, it's my data and my applications. Those are the important things of the business. That doesn't mean that we've, you know, made, you know, IT is not yet a utility. It's not completely commoditized. There's differentiation. So maybe help explain a little bit, you know, Nutanix in the Microsoft ecosystem and how that fits in the overall view of, you know, Nutanix's value in the marketplace. Sure. So with the larger vision that Nutanix had, which is let's simplify everything below the app layer, we did start at one place, which is just to fundamentally clean up and simplify the physical infrastructure. So you have, you know, storage arrays over here, servers over here, a sand fabric in between, virtualization layered on top of that, all coming from different vendors, not necessarily all tested together. I know because I used to work at these vendors. Right? All different management consoles. It's really hard to become a mastermind of all of that, to have it optimized and not to have points of failure. So we said the first thing we need to do is eliminate that complexity. And so we brought that down into like a single building block appliance, which ultimately got termed hyper-converged infrastructure. But that wasn't our destination, right? But that was just, we needed common building blocks like Lego pieces, right? That can snap together without any fuss and allow the companies to build that up. Then from there, we can then raise the level of simplification all the way between the physical infrastructure to the app. So one of the things though, we get an immediate benefit from when we consolidate storage and servers, the virtualization is that we improve performance for things like Microsoft SQL or Exchange. So no longer do you have that long hop from the compute with the servers all the way out to the external storage arrays. It all collapses, performance gets better, we eliminate points of failure. And in fact, even when you have multiple of these Lego blocks, this cluster, we try to always associate the data and the compute onto the same node. So there's very little latency at all. So Microsoft SQL Exchange performance goes up, the uptime goes up, and then to manage it is also simpler. Right, so Microsoft business productivity apps live on the Nutanix infrastructure. They benefit immediately by going to this simpler infrastructure versus this complex distributed architecture where there's different pieces from different vendors. All right, so we hear from Microsoft and we know customers here. It's a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud world. So how does the Microsoft pieces of that fit in with the Nutanix story? Well, we realize that customers want to have choice. So if you look at really the three pillars, they come from all of our founding is we want to be able to make it simple, we want to make it scalable, and we do want to give you choice. So when we look at that last one, we're going to give you a choice of whatever, let's say hypervisor you wish to use. It could be Hyper-V, it could be ESXi, it could be the Nutanix, AHV, it could be Zen server from Citrix. All of those are supported. We support this on multiple different hardware platforms. So you have Dell EMC, Lenovo, IBM, Fujitsu in Europe. We just added Hitachi last week as a partner. We run on Cisco, we run on HPE servers, and the list continues to grow. So whatever is your standard, we'll go ahead and work with that. We'll give you choice of different clouds as well. So the software to manage and optimize is not only just for your on-prem environment, you can use this if you're in a distributed environment, whether it's Robo or Edge sites like oil rigs and other IoT, we can give the same interface and then the same interface out to the public cloud as well. So we'll give you choice of different clouds, different platforms, different hypervisors, and then different operating systems. We support everything from a Windows server environment to Linux and even IBM's AIX. All are supported on the platform. So you get to have it fit the way you want to work versus the other way around. How closely do you work with customers in making these decisions? Because as you said, your goal is simplification, making it easy for them to choose and deploy. So how do you walk them through the process and is it ever analysis paralysis? Because there are simply so many options. Well, for some customers who are struggling with that choice, we do offer our own branded appliance. So it's very simple. You have the computing framework, the Nutanix software is there, it's one single support line to call, and that's a very simple model. Other customers though have chosen who their platform of choice is, whether that's on-prem like a physical server or it's a public cloud. That choice oftentimes has already been made, right? We're just working with that. So for those who've already have an opinion at the customer site, we'll work with that. If for some reason they don't have opinion or they want it even simpler, they can go with the Nutanix branded offering, but we'll work either way. Great. Brian, you go to a number of different shows. What are you hearing from customers? What are some of the challenges? What are they looking for? And maybe what's different about the customers you hear here at the Microsoft Show versus some of the others we might hear? Well, it depends on who you're talking to, right? So if you're talking to the C-suite at the end of the day, these are the guys, or gals, running the donut company. They're running the trucking company and they view IT just like they view HR or finance or whatever. It's like, yes, that's absolutely critical. We need that function, but the goal is to make it more efficient, more effective so I can deliver more shipments, make more donuts, right? So for the C-suite, they want to see on my capital that I'm investing, what is the return on this? And do I have to over commit capital now because I can only buy it in big chunks? So we address that by having what we call fractional consumption. Basically you're buying one Lego block at a time. So you're not consuming capital that could elsewhere be used in the business. So the C-suite, they have a different, one set of needs. Then you look at the Sysadmins and they are overwhelmed. With all this complexity of infrastructure, it burns all their time. They're spending all their nights, all their weekends. They're not very happy. They make mistakes. If we can give them back hours in their day, they're going to be more productive. They can actually do higher level tasks. And then even for the folks on the dev team, if we can simplify the infrastructure and spin up new instances, whether it's containers or VMs, and they can even do it through cell service, that makes them more productive. So we try to address the needs of all those audiences. And those, the customers you're referring to, they are different groups of customers, but they're all ostensibly the same company. So are they talking to each other? I mean, are the tech people talking to the business people in terms of what are overarching goals here? Yeah, they do talk to each other. And granted, probably the audience we talk with most frequently are the Sysadmins, because we're very operationally tied. They will then, and we'll arm them with arguments, they then talk to the C-suite. So I was just presenting yesterday here, told them you're going to get your nights and weekends back, but when you got to go talk to the CFO, here are the things that that person's going to care about. When you go talk to the dev team, here's the things that you need to share with them. So, you know, we do arm the Sysadmins, but we have a growing presence at the C-suite, for example, and we've also started attending a number of developer conferences, saying, hey, this actually makes sense to you to get your job done. It's not just the Sysadmins, it's you as a developer, it's you as a leader of the company. This is transforming the power of IT to help fulfill the organization's mission. I'm curious about your perceptions of Microsoft. Right now, we have Satya Nadella who really portrays this company as a company that is open, inclusive, with a growth mindset. Don't be a know it all, be a learn it all. I mean, is that your, do you feel that as someone who works closely with Microsoft, it rubs up against its colleagues and products? I think it's an embrace, like what Nutanix had in regards to, the reality is customers want choice and it's not one size fits all, not one cookie cutter approach. So Satya is saying, hey, what can we do to integrate with Linux? Never would heard under maybe the previous regimes, right? What can you do to work more closely in the app and development environments that the app developers want to work in? So there's a lot of affinity I think between Nutanix and where Satya is going and then providing that choice, providing best in class wherever you can and then let the customer choose but provide them the pros and cons so they make an informed decision. Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Well, thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Stu. It's always great to be here. We will have more from the CUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.