 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program. I guess we had on in the early days of theCUBE, Jason Langone, who is now the director of OEM Sales at Nutanix. Jason, it was great to see you. Thanks for having me Stu. So you and I were reminiscing. I think back in the early days of theCUBE, a lot of times we're scrambling around. It's like last minute, oh my God, who are we going to have on the program? You and I had met right around the time I joined Wikibon. theCUBE was starting. You and I would get together for like breakfast at the beginning of VMworld. Talk about what's going on. Talk about all the different pieces. And it was out of VMworld that I was like, oh my God, I need somebody to talk about VDI. And there you and Andre Lieberviki were walking by, put you on the program. And for some reason, we've talked many times since then, but we haven't had any on the program since then. Yeah, no, I'm happy to have been filler back then. It was the right place at the right time. And it's great to be here, Stu. Yeah, so you've gone through a number of changes at Nutanix. You were the first federal field guy for Nutanix. They're part of the first class of field people. How many field people does Nutanix have now? I mean, we're over 2,000 employees now in both of them are salespeople. So I reflect for a second. Tell us what you've seen the company grow. You've been there the early days through it now. What's changed, what's the same? I'd say the thing that hits me the most is the grit that I so much loved in the early days. They're like young, scrappy company, kind of have to be. I think the vast majority of that grit remains. And I think for us to be successful in what we want to do, and Deer just talked about chapter one versus two and three, you know, we have to maintain that sense of grit, that sense of scrappiness, which has been fantastic. No, come on, you guys, you IPO'd, you're all going to get fat and lazy, and you know, just become the incumbents that everybody likes to beat on, right? I mean, I think if you look at the DNA of the people here, forget the company, like you look at the DNA of the people that help contribute to the culture, that's nobody's mentality here at all. Okay, so, you know, when we talked to you last time on theCUBE many years ago, it was VDI, and is it going to be here? VDI is a piece of Nutanix's business, and it's funny, you know, I think it's your fault. Everybody used to say, you know, Nutanix, they're nothing but a company that sells VDI to the federal group. And I'm like, well, that's Jason, but you know, it was more than just you and it's more than a team, but you guys have expanded a lot, you know, where you sell to, how you sell to, you know, it's changed greatly over the years, yes? Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm very thankful for the company's success in VDI early on. You think if we were knocking on other doors to get in the data center, maybe we wouldn't be where we are today. The other important thing I think is we got in through VDI and we recognized, okay, now we have to be mature enough for all these other enterprise workloads, and you've seen that come to fruition over the last couple of years. Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, we have a huge number of the team there, people that had, you know, strong Citrix knowledge, plenty of former Citrix people in the company, a lot from the virtualization side and have grown. So now you're on the OEM side, so explain a little bit as to how the kind of the go to market's changed, you know, how you look at it kind of globally. Well, the nice thing is so I'm on the Lenovo team here at Nutanix and it's very reminiscent of 2011, 2012, just core Nutanix selling to NX, right? It's young, it's scrappy, we're still trying to figure it out. Yes, we're making some mistakes and fixing those as we go forward, but it is fun that it's very like us against the world kind of feeling, which is I think a nice place to be. We've seen some great early wins and like key verticals like healthcare, service provider. We're seeing some interesting trends from emerging market, which is someplace Nutanix hasn't been, you know, overly strong in over the years, but with our OEM partnerships we're starting to get in, you know, more unique places. Yeah, and if I remember the stat right from Xeroji said, for Nutanix about 35% of the business is international today. If you look at the companies that you OEM with, the Dell, Lenovo, the world are more than half non-U.S., so it seems to be that they will be the help for some of the global clients, correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you think of where we're trying to get to for the next big step, OEM will be a very big part of that, right? Yeah. Anything in particular? I mean, there's lots of blocking in tab of them that happens at the local and the country level. What's, you know, you've worked in the past, you know, for a variety of companies, you know, what lessons has Nutanix learned, the partnerships, you know, how do you guys make sure that you're going to be successful? You know, I think one of the things, a lot of different people and teams that Nutanix have done is start to build like their own brands. You know, if you know Andrew Mills, he's got like the WuTanix shirts and you know, it's a rallying point for, you know, him and some of his Citrix Alliance partners, you know, on the Lenovo side, who got this whole be the king, I think you've seen the lion's shirt or the lion crest on the polos. So I think it's creating like a joint rallying point for alliance partners, for OEM partners. So it's not just this is Nutanix, this is us and you know, come rally around us. It's what can we do together? What can we build together? And having some kind of joint brand or something there, I think is helpful. Okay, great. So how about at the show, you know, you've been involved in a number of things. What have you been excited about? What kind of, you know, we had the keynote this morning, you know, what are the areas that are exciting you? I mean, I am pumped for the Call My O acquisition, rolling that in, seeing how that's going to get rolled into prism. To me, you know, the free time that I can find at night, that's what I'm playing with. I'm playing a lot with Callum, using other external APIs to interact with Callum and then do something to Nutanix. To me, that is extremely exciting. And you think about it, you know, in the closing keynote we'll have tonight, we'll talk a little bit about context, right? So you think of like, how have we been interacting with data centers the last 56 years? It's somebody sitting in front of a keyboard or mouse and doing this, you know, how can we get smarter, not only in how they interact like you with your fancy iPad and your Bluetooth keyboard, touchscreen and things like that, but also having intelligence around the input. So for example, if there's a snowstorm in DC, city shuts down, well, maybe the system can proactively spin up additional virtual machines or virtual desktops, stuff like that. Yeah, it's interesting, remember we had kind of, you know, Web 2.0 with social media, but context has been the next thing people are looking about, right, you know, my phone, you know, it knows that I'm here in Austria and it recommends things very differently and it knows that I speak English and, you know, I expect a kind doge. So, you know, it's not going to give me too much in German. So how does that tie in, you know, you take context computing, you think about, you know, Google or, you know, Echo and Alexa and Siri and some of those things. How does that tie back to Nutanix? What do you think about trying to automate the kind of the fray or the bottom third of what an IT person has to do? The value is at the top of the stack, right? And that's something back in the year of VDI, whatever year that was, you know, one of the things I used to talk about is the value is in the application and in the end user, it's not in speeds and feeds and users per core and all that stuff, kind of taking the same approach to core data center applications. Let's streamline, you know, used to be make storage invisible to make the hypervisor invisible. Now let's make some of these operations invisible and also feed intelligence into the system. Okay, so explain to me how that's different from kind of the puppet chefs of the world that help with the automation. Not sure I'm quite getting the context. So that would be the automation framework. That would be the grunt that's doing X, right? But how do you determine what X is? You know, for example, if I've got a data center in Italy, maybe it's prone to earthquakes. Well, I could hit a geological API like we can in the U.S. And if there's any activity over 4.0 on Erector, proactively fail stuff over. And that's using external data sets and API calls to do something smarter with the data center. That's, you know, how do you build, you know, services around that? You know, I think about, you know, the poor average, you know, administrator around there, you know, doesn't have time to think about a lot of that. You build communities, you build services. How do you start to build an ecosystem around that? Or maybe it exists and I'm not aware. Yeah, I mean, I think it's more the latter. I think it's the stuff exists. And for the most part, these things are free. Like I could tap into BBC or Der Spiegel or New York Times via API calls and do things off news events. You know, there's been a lot of news in the last 24 hours and you could take action on that, right? So I think it's recognizing what's out there. Clearly it's finding the time to tinker and pull things and build a robot system so you don't have any single points of failure in the ecosystem. But almost all this stuff exists today in one way or another. Okay, and what about IoT? I think that kind of fits into some of it. Very much so. Some of the morning keynotes. Does that connect with some of the things you talked about there? It does. I mean, if you think about it, what's creating the context? Well, the context is created because everything we've got in our life is connected. A lot of it's receiving data, retransmitting data, storing data. That's what's creating the context. I'm tapping into my thermostat or two motion sensors in my house or whatever it might be. To create context, I'm home. I'm in the living room. Cold in the bedroom where every night I turn the thermostat down. That's context. That's possible because almost everything now is connected or will be connected. Even refrigerators, silly things we wouldn't have thought of, right? And it's interesting. I remember back when we talked about VDI, the problem is that I had too many pieces and I needed people to do so many of those layers in between the layers. We're not stopping how many layers I'm adding on top of what I have here. I mean, IoT. The surface area of my infrastructure is going to be orders of magnitude bigger than what we have. The recent DDoS attack showed us that, oh boy, security is going to be a real challenge there. So if I want to take advantage of what's happening, I better have some frameworks. I better have, you know, it sounds like context and that both automation and orchestration to be able to pull those together. Otherwise, there's no way I can take advantage of those. Very much so. And you also need the time, right? And I can't have the time if I'm doing sand zoning and some of the things that we've been doing for 10 years and some of the things that are starting to go away. You know, that occupies time that wouldn't allow me to build value and build a competitive advantage for my organization. Yeah, I love that discussion at time. It's, you know, the problem we always have is, you know, show me an IT team that says that, you know, they're getting more people or they're not going to have more work next year versus this year. And the limit we all have is time. But I tell you, going around this city, it's, you found some amazing, you know, inventors and musicians and things like that. They didn't have all this technology and they had the same 24 hours in the day and some of the amazing things that they did. So how do we get, you know, enterprises and, you know, the poor IT people to be able to get back some of that time to create greatness rather than, you know, running around keeping things up? I think part of it's probably the really good wine here in Vienna. I think that maybe that contributed to the innovation. And I do think it's simplifying the stack that's not really important, right? I mean, Iops and these things. So we're to a point where every platform probably has more than enough Iops to meet 90% of the workloads, right? So as that continues to evolve, in the weeds no longer matters, right? That frees up the time where I was spending and doing firmware updates and now we've got one click upgrades. And, you know, that stuff I think is being offset significantly, right? Yes, so, you know, we now are reaching a point that there's a lot of other companies and especially some of the big companies have something that might be good enough from a hyper-converged standpoint. So then, how does Nutanix stay differentiated from those guys if, because I agree, we usually spend, especially in the storage industry, way too much on speeds and feeds and, you know, most of the applications fit and most of the solution is okay. So, yeah, I mean, the word hyper-converged, I mean, I think Howard Ting a year or two years ago started talking, make storage invisible, make the hypervisor invisible. I mean, I think it was at that point a lot of people here at Nutanix, not that we don't use the word, but it's certainly not a word we're leading with in conversation. We're talking enterprise cloud platform and it's platform because you can tie into it, you can take the context of other things around the data center, around the platform and be smart with it. And if you just candidly look at the other ones that call themselves in that market, and there are a lot of them now, which is great, personally, because more people are talking about it, you know, they're very much tied to one hypervisor or there's no real open API way to communicate with it or it's not built for cloud consumption or they can't scale out past whatever. I mean, if you look at them, there's a lot of, and they'll get better, right? I mean, we all know these other things will get better, but if you look at that market today, a lot of them were not built for next generation enterprise cloud. They were built very much for virtual machines and three tiered but better, three tiered with lipstick, that kind of thing, which is good for us, right? And more people talking about it the better. Yeah, absolutely. So are you having more conversations about cloud and kind of hybrid cloud with customers when you talked on that? Yeah, I mean, that was one of the big kind of eye-openers when I moved out of the US federal team to the OEM team and I'm touching, you know, people all over the planet. There's a lot more conversations on not just building like cloud, but consuming like cloud. And that was part of the morning keynote, right? It was not just building a data center that looks like Amazon, but building a consumption model that's like amazon.com and the storefront that is amazon.com. So yeah, you see the need and the desire. It's like, well, how do I do it? Yeah, it's funny. I think back to the conversation I had with you years ago is people talk about simplicity, but, you know, your upgrade to add a note to your thing is simple enough that even an analyst like me can do it. I mean, it was literally talking, it's like, no, no, Stu, unbox it. Plug in the power, plug in the network, turn it on, press the button, done as opposed to, the storage group is always like, oh, I can have a fourth grader do this because they run through this wizard. And when you're done, you know, if you followed this piece of paper and did these 12 steps, it works. And I'm like, well, pressing a button sure seemed a whole lot easier than following these 12 subs and hope I didn't fat finger something, hoping I didn't, you know, do it. Yeah, very much. You think about like when you get a new device or even like a Nest or whatever you're using at home for your connected environment. This stuff's easy now. This is made for my mom to be able to open up the pretty box, plug it in, figure out how to get on a Wi-Fi and more or less be done with it, right? Control it from her phone, something like that. So it's awesome to see the data center and data center technologies and supporting technologies get some more of that consumer-like touch. Yeah, it goes back to the term we used a few years back to consumerization of IT, which from the person using it, it should be, you know, my IT should be as good or better as what I had at home, but it's from the IT administrator, right? It should be as easy as, you know, I one-click from Amazon, I get the thing, I open it. I don't have to read through 17 pages of manual. It should be intuitive to be able to use it out of the box. And I think you guys hit both ends of that spectrum. Yeah, I mean, a great proof point. You mentioned the larger market that is hyper-converged now and someone kind of tells a story around consumerization, bring up the UI. You know, let's Google image your UI and see what it looks like. And, you know, a lot of times people are overwhelmed by what these other platforms, like, I don't want to deal with that. Like, I want to deal with something easy and intuitive, right? Just any stories from the customers you've had speaking around the conference that you want to share with the audience? I mean, I'm amazed at how innovative some of these people are, you know, they're hardcore looking to automate things. They're looking to roll out Docker instances or containers into hundreds across multiple continents, surge and bring things up based on customers that are hitting, you know, their various data centers. That's cool to see. It's cool to see people start to build out. And we had some of these on the U.S. federal side. You know, global mesh networks, more or less, of Nutanix. You know, maybe there's a central hub in Berlin and that's where the headquarters is and they're pushing things out globally and knowing that everything is, you know, secure and compliant and meeting the standards. I mean, it's awesome to see the adoption just in general of the platform. Yeah, it's interesting. We always talk to you about kind of misconception of the marketplace. Isn't Nutanix just a box that's sold to, you know, small environments that, you know, sounds like your customers you're talking to were, you know, seeing Nutanix in a much different light. Yeah, I mean, I don't, we used to get that in 2012. It's like, what's Nutanix? I've never heard of this stuff. It's high risk. You know, and the reality is we're in a place where we aren't the high risk option in this market. Right? All these other people are trying to figure out what their alliance relationship or their OEM relationship or what they're going to buy and hope it works. That's the risk now. You know, the risk to us is not innovating, not staying in front, losing our grit. That's where the risk exists for us today. Yeah, so just being a public company now, does that overcome some of those hurdles about being a risky company? I'm sure it does, right? I mean, for some large organizations, that's one of the check boxes of consideration or real consideration. I think overall, though, most people knew where Nutanix was. They knew where we are in the market. They listened to Deerage and Siddy's talk about vision and Howard Ting talk about vision, which I think is invigorating. Jason, I want to give you the final word, take away from the show that you want people to have. Aside from the fact that the wine here in Vienna, man, I'm blown away, that was good. I really think the stuff we're talking about this conference is tangible. You know, like a lot of times, I think you come to one of these conferences, you sit through the keynote, it's like, that's awesome stuff in 2019 or the fall of 2018. A lot of the stuff is available today. A lot of the stuff you could roll out today, you could do today, you could make better than what we've presented today. To me, that's what's important. Like, we're giving you stuff to use more or less now. Jason Langoni, great to catch up with you. Definitely, I will check out some more of the Austrian wine before I leave. And great to catch up with you again. We'll be back with more coverage here, day one coverage of Nutanix.next Europe. You're watching theCUBE.