 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Patti. He is the Chief Product and Development Officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Glad to be here. So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage, there was many, many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? Yeah, I mean, I have to do so. In fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always, you know, teaches me that all I do is essentially change the timeline, but the same slide shows up. But you know, there's something about vision being consistent and we've sort of broken that up into two major phases. The first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to an experience. And what do I mean by that? Essentially, everybody knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon or Google or Azure. And ultimately, our belief has been that if we do a honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively, but bring cloud to the customers rather than having customers go to a destination, then they can essentially get maybe 60, 70% of that experience but maybe at a 10th of the price or a 10th of the time. And most human beings, as you guys know, is that once you get 60, 70%, you're happy and you move on to other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion, solve one of cloud's biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift gets in the way is that I got to change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've got to lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do, but like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60%, then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix, looking at public cloud as a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste Amazon outside, the more they want Amazon inside, right? And so that's really the first act of the company. The series of products that allow us to build out a full-blown IA stack, but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one-click operations. So that's the first act. And the second act, which is much more, if I can call it a longer-term bet for the next decade or so, is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to re-platform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps. And when they redesign their apps, do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud or do you want to do it in something that can move across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core businesses, humming along, solid. But the growth is going to come from Essentials, which is the enterprise, and multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product of them, keys are in, you're the keys to the kingdom. It's all on you, it's a deal. It's in my guide, for now. So you got your team, but this is a big, this is the pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about it as a software company, as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software, things start to be different. So as you start thinking about the act two, the convergence of clouds, that really is a key part of it. When you did it for the data center, ACI, you're doing ACI for the cloud. What does that actually mean? Yeah, totally. So explain that concept. No, it's a great question. And some of this, obviously we are struggling through ourselves, but we're not afraid of making mistakes in this transition. As you've seen over the last year, we've gone from being an appliance company to a software that runs on third party, to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds, right? All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go, but to your point, I think, Dave, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said, look, I'm going to release Office on Mac or iPad before I even do it on Windows. That kind of thinking has to permeate, in pretty much in my opinion, every technology vendor going forward. A good example of that is, look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they've built on Nutanix on-premise, but their idea was, look, they don't want to be in the data center business tomorrow, without changing the apps, they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric, because they provide a bunch of other services, as well as data centers. So our recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS, not on AWS for a reason, is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance-only company. What does this mean for your customers and your partners, because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements very successfully off the tee in the middle of the fairway, as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend. Others taking a different approach. You can do what that is, own it all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I would say that, look, in some way internally we joke about ourselves as we had to prove the, we used to always think about ourselves as a smartphone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center, but we had to prove that model by owning the full stack, like Apple did. But over a period of time, two democratization happens by distribution. And so in some way we have to become more of an Android-like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and security of an Apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where we're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspire, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want this experience. And now the latest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentially super micro like appliance goodness, one click firmware, upgrade, support, everything, but with a HPE-backed platform that both companies can benefit from. You know, one of the big complaints from customers I hear on theCUBE and also privately is there's so many tools and management software, I got a management plane for this, I got this over here. So there's kind of this, you know, tool shed mentality of, you know, new hire, learn this tool for that software. People don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So how do you see that? How do you address that with going forward this Act 2 as you continue to build the products? What's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? Yeah, I mean, I think it's no different than I think how we've sort of launched the company in the first place, which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyperconvergence has done. It just, we're doing this not just for infrastructure, but for clouds because when you use Nutanix, you throw away old compute. You throw away old storage. You throw away old virtualization. I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together 10 tools into this magical fabric, right? Doesn't work that way. But that's hard because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner's ready to do that. They've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey that we are on. It's a ride of passage for us. We have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. So you mentioned Steve Jobs. He also said when he was alive in an interview on the last interview, it was on Netflix. I watched it recently. He said also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies and change the game much more significantly than managing a process improvement, which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60, 80% change over with software. This is part of your strategy. How do you guys see Nutanix in the future with the software led or approach changing the game for IT? What's the ultimate? I think clearly software is fundamental. I mean, the whole point of us, our product was, I think we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere. By the way, it doesn't run in air, right? It runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software, which is essentially also when you go back to the Apple thing, because there are a lot of software vendors out there too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than going directly to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next five years. I want to ask you about innovation and your process, because here you are, you are the chief product officer at this very creative company. I want to know what sparks your creativity. Where do you get your ideas? I mean, of course you're going to say, I talk to customers and I find out their problems, and then I, but where do you go for inspiration? Yeah, I mean, I think it's an age old problem. I'll give you my personal answer. I don't think it's representative of everybody in the company, obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix, that each of us have their own point of view on things, right? It's okay. We have this term of let chaos reign and then reign in chaos, right? To some extent, that has been done well at other companies like Google and so forth. So, at least I've always believed in, obviously, a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others, more than talk, whether it's listen to customers, listen to partners, listen to other employees with other ideas, and have a curated way to do that, because if you only listen to customers, you'll build faster horses, not cars, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's what I would call a genetic theme, and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from the signal, from the noise, by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen. That's the first thing I would say. The second thing, which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the, the first one applies to 1%. The second one probably applies to maybe 0.001%, which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth, it's ability to see around corners or anticipate. My old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton, he was the CEO for Citrix. He used to always ask this question, do you know why Michelin has three stars? The first star is for food, obviously, it has to be good food. Second star is for service. The third star, not many people know why it's for. According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, even too many Michelin's three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? And so to me, I think that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. It's that second dimension of intuition, more so than even listening to customers. It's seeing around those corners and knowing which way the winds are blowing. One of the other things that we're talking a lot about here on theCUBE, but particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix, we had Dheeraj this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down. How would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? So I think we, I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple of things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, is a couple of things that you will see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from zero to 90, right? And the folks that continuously learn stay, and they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders or whatever, right? So continuous learning, if it can be applied to the generic company, becomes an amplifying effect now. The people can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things that otherwise they're not born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix, I think inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension which I think everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, those four words sort of capture the essence of the playful authenticity, but I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think, is easy to say, very hard to do. You learn through your mistakes, as they say, learn through failure. So, you mentioned intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi-cloud, on-premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition. Of course, Wikibon had the first private cloud reports to Miniman and Team, they got that right. The waves are coming, and they're going to look different. There's going to be more integration, we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are going to come in to the landscape of the tech industry? Yeah, I mean, I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and I have something left over, I will say one thing, though, is I think, look, the game in multi-cloud is going to move up the stack. Okay, that's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought, is who's going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks. Some of them are SaaS stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest SaaS companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. How about the Edge? What's the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant. You got power, you got connectivity expanding. Wi-Fi sticks around the corner, we're seeing that. 5G and all that. 5G, okay, I buy it, but as it starts to really figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in. I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but my intuition tells me that the more things change, the more they'll remain the same in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smartphone. You know, it's got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, it talks to services in the back end. I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that makes sense. Yeah, exactly, yeah, great. And the data, big part of it, big part of your strategy, the data piece? Of course, of course, yeah. I mean, I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think, in the next five, 10 years, man. Awesome. So what's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees? What's some of the trending conversations? This conversation is pretty interesting. I agree. We agree. My intuition is tell me it's a good conversation. Hope it comes out good. Keep using that word, man. I love it. Anyway, we always date to be with you guys. Sunil, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, coming, returning to theCUBE. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any time. Any time. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us.