 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sami Zaghlami. He is the SVP Sales Europe, Nutanix, and Sylvain Ciou. He is the senior director systems engineer for EMEA at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. For you for returning and this is your first time. First time, absolutely. Well, I want to start with you. You were on the main stage this morning and you were describing being one of the first few employees in France working out of hotel lobbies, keeping all the promotional materials in your house and people not even knowing how to pronounce Nutanix. Now, here you are. For you six years later, describe a little bit what this journey has been like for you being at Nutanix. Well, this journey is a successful journey, obviously, where we started from scratch in EMEA, where we built a lot of relationship with the channel. We started to have our first stories with customers. And the only thing we could not forecast was the speed of growth. And if you told me six years ago that we would be four and a half thousand in this conference, I wouldn't have believed it. Now, I think the overall journey is an accelerated journey of development that we have. Sammy, bring us inside a little bit about, you know, we sometimes call it nation building, but, you know, the channel, of course, very important. You know, talked about some of the kind of the challenges and some of the successes as to what has made Nutanix so successful in your time. Yeah, I think, you know, the technology is for sure a big element in this that is solving business problems. But when you think about it, there's many stories of great technologies that didn't make it, or didn't make it big. So I think the openness of this company, from day one, to work with partners, to work with an ecosystem of alliance partners, we were also very open to share how the Nutanix technology is built and is working. So there's a lot of openness around, you know, how this works. It's not a black box and we integrate with the ecosystem. So for our positioning, which is mainly initially the data center, the large environments, we have to integrate into customer environment. We have to integrate with existing technologies. And the fact that we are open from day one and we keep that line is helping a lot in the traction. I want to get into that strategy in a little bit, but I want to bring you into this conversation too, Sylvan. And just to have you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the competitive landscaping. What are some of the things that Nutanix needs to focus on because the competitors are really edging in? We are more focused to deliver our vision and continue to build the pieces that are still under construction right now. And to be back on the question about the partners, the adoption also come first from the partners before the customers. And really working with them, engaging with them was the result of the success. It was not just signing contract, enable them, but really engaging with them at customer sites. And as soon as they see the reaction of the customer, they completely believe in it and we scale very fast because of them. Yeah, I'm wondering if we could get both of your comments. Talk about the competition for talent also. When you're talking about Nutanix over 5,000, the channel is very strong. It makes it a little bit tougher to kind of pull those pieces in. If you're Silicon Valley, oh, there's this startup I want to join, things like that, but I have to imagine things are a little bit different in Mia. I would say, well, competition for talents is definitely here in Mia, especially on the topics that we are tackling in the cloud, the DevOps, big data, et cetera. Now, we are an attractive brand. There's a demonstrated path of development for employees. So I think on top of being a successful company, we have a lot of proof points of building careers. So people want to join for the fun, for the success, but also to build a fast career. That helps. Now, saying that is still not an easy task. You know, there's especially the volume of recruitment we are doing. So we have organized ourselves very well to onboard people, enable people, and maybe be in a position to hire people that don't have all the skills, but have the right DNA, and then we can always teach the skills. That's the way we are organized today. And on the technical side, all the other previews, IT vendor, let's say, was looking for specialists of complexity, you know, what is behind the scene. And we are in different situations, meaning that we can start small first, and we talk about the project of the customer. And until this project works, we cannot move forward. We cannot upsell. So our situation is more consultative and being a trusted advisor of what they try to achieve and not anymore on what we try to build on our side. That's a very important point. The mindset of successful employees are the ones that are focused on the outcomes. You know, they're not here to sell a product, they focus on project and the outcome of customers. So how do you find that person when you're interviewing your pool of applicants? I mean, that is such an important part of the culture here, this people first attitude, and really being all hands on deck if a customer has an issue. So how do you know when you're interviewing someone that they have got the right DNA to be here? Well, first we know before they joined the interview because we are well connected on the market and we have sources of information about how they operate on day to day. Now, of course, experience of hiring so many people over the years helps and there's a lot of small details that we can notice in our recruitment process. And then we've gone very professional in the way we recruit. We still have a lot of referrals as well from employees which helps in terms of, you know, making sure we're hiring the right DNA. But we want to diversify. We don't want people coming from the same background. We're doing a pretty good job on diversity on every topic, you know, gender, ethnicity, background. This is, you know, a pretty good success. All right, so Sammy, you've got a new role. So give us a little bit of insight as to your vision, what we should expect to see as a strategy for Nutanix and Amia. I would say first, you know, three months on the job and I have no intent to break anything that works. I think there's a successful recipient in Amia which is the legacy of Chris Cadaras. Lots of good methodologies, lots of good principles of working. No intention to change that. Maybe the phase after that for Amia but for the whole company is to focus on our strength. And we see that, you know, our technology is well suited for mission critical environment, is well suited for strategic projects for customers and maybe we should become the default, you know, vendor that you think about when you go for mission critical projects and, you know, transformation. I think today we do a very broad set of projects with customers. Tomorrow I would like customers to think first about Nutanix when they think about something that is critical to their business. And in the same way for partners, if we can move from being a vendor with high gross, great margin to a vendor that is helping them transform, you know, their business model or the way they attack different segments, you know, then we will have achieved a good phase too. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing you right now? Well, the biggest challenge is inside, clearly, is growth. We see that in every area, every time we grow fast, then suddenly you need to change organization processes, your principle of working and you need to reassess yourself and your way of doing things. Even at personal level, that's the biggest challenge. I think if we are not constantly paranoid about reassessing that, growth can break a lot of quality in the relationship with customers, but also in our velocity. I wonder if you could bring us inside the customers a little bit. What are some of the key roles that you find, you know, where does Nutanix have the best engagement with and, you know, strategically, where would Nutanix maybe change over time as to where they're engaging with the customer? So, now there is no more question about the fact that part of the IT will be in the cloud, part will be internally, some people will go more one side or the other side. Because Nutanix have both technology on both side, we can take care of all school application and be sure that can still run in the cloud. And on this side, if you develop an application totally distributed and so on, meaning cloud native, we can run in on Nutanix and all the platform looks like the public cloud for this application. So, we are the unique situation where we can, we don't need to be in the cloud or outside of the cloud, meaning that we can give a strategy with the customers or what it can do, what is the good point, what is the most difficult to achieve on both side. And also we provide a way to package application to deploy everywhere. We have all these governance tools on top of it because we know the new way of consuming the cloud is more open bar, but you need some way of controlling the situation. And we are really trusted advisor on their strategy to define what will be their IT in two, three, or four years. Okay, so it sounds like not just the infrastructure owner but talking to the application owner or some of the C-suite that might make some of those broader strategic decisions. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The platform works, meaning that there is no more question on that, that scale, you get all the benefits that you can see on the public cloud. Now it's more the way you consume it, you organize the consumption, and also you have the same environment, whatever is the application, to have the best place for this application. What would you say, you're here, as you said, in Copenhagen, thousands of European customers all here under one roof. What are you getting out of this? What kind of conversations are you hearing? What's most surprising to you? I know we're only in the beginning of day one, but what are you hearing right now? Well, we talked to a few customers already and what's a very common pattern. Most of the customers I talk so far, they're really accelerating on becoming a service organization. So enterprise companies, they really want to organize themselves to be cloud ops. And even though we were talking about automation before, now they really are doing it, and they are actually focusing on changing the skills of their teams, the organizations, and of course the technology afterwards. Yeah, any particulars on automation? Because I think back, we've been talking about automation my entire career, yet I agree with you today, it is a more substantial conversation on automation. Are there any particulars either in Nutanix portfolio or some of the kind of partner tooling out there that are kicking things along? So we talk about automation since a long time, but most of the time that was you have an orchestrator, it's like a Swiss knife, and you can orchestrate what you want. But at the end of the day, nothing was done. We believe that the platform must be automated by design, and everything needs to be by design. So it's the difference between the previous way of thinking of automation, and now where the platform is totally automated. I believe you've said autonomous is the word that we were looking for. Yes. This is actually the point. If it's not autonomous, why bother, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we had example of customers who launched private cloud projects, and they had like 8,000 Mondays to build the orchestration of the private cloud. And honestly, if you don't have 100,000 VMs to run, it makes no sense. So the fact that now it's built in, and it's not a project to have automation, you know, that makes sense economically as well. Great. Well, Sammy and CU, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure having you. Pleasure, Rebecca. Thanks a lot. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .next.