 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome to Miami, Florida, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and we're here with theCUBE at Nutanix Next Conference. It's the inaugural conference, almost a thousand people here, which is an astounding number for a company that is just about five years old, less than six years old, Stu, and we're seeing a packed house here in Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. A lot of energy, a lot of disruption going on. Nutanix, for those of you who don't know, is a company that's tracking well over $250 million. Many forecasts have Nutanix up around $500 million in run rate and bookings this year. We'll be able to tighten them up those numbers, but essentially what Nutanix does is there's this term that emerged, sort of debate about who coined it, but hyper-converged, bringing together all different components of infrastructure through software, allowing the scaling of infrastructure, doing essentially what the hyperscale guys have done in their little domains, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, with Azure, bringing that into the enterprise, something that we've been talking about at Wikibon and on theCUBE for many, many years now. Nutanix went out and actually developed products around that and has developed a thriving business around it. It's pre-IPO company, a lot of talk about going IPO. We just came off the keynote stew, a lot of energy in there. It took a while for the crowd to get warmed up. Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, came on after something we hadn't ever seen before at a conference these I haven't. The customers, two customers stood up, the first customers of Nutanix stood up and announced the conference, greeted everybody in the conference, and then turned it over to Dheeraj, and he was very humble. That's one of his H's, we'll be talking about that. We had some VCs come on, and it was sort of a content rich morning, and then they hit us with the products and the announcements, and that's when the crowd really got into it. The engineers in the audience, the architects, the practitioners, the alpha geeks, they wanted that red meat, and they were dying for it. We saw it on Twitter, come on, show us the announcements, show us the innovation, and then it came, and then there was a crescendo of applause throughout the demo session, so overall, Stu, what are your thoughts? Pretty good. Yeah, Dave, so when we go to these type of events, how do we highlight the user community in no better way than to start off with one of the users here, really liked it, Howard Ting came out, thanked the customers, thanked all the employees. I mean, Dave, it's pretty impressive. They call them the Newtons. I think kind of funny, they got a big X in thing, kind of a little X-Men mutant type promotion, some nice bright colors, but Nutanix over 1,100 employees. It's interesting to me, I remember the first time I heard about Nutanix and talked to them, they had about 40 companies, 40 employees inside the company. Dave, when you hired me to Wikibon five years ago, it was the converged infrastructure and cloud space that you told me to go work at when I talked to David Floyer in my early days at Wikibon, it was what are those hyper scale companies doing? The early companies that were using Flash, one of the main reasons I talked to Nutanix early is they, in their first iteration of the product, used a Fusion IO card inside it and productized a solution to leverage that new architecture of Flash. And obviously they've come a long way, they don't use Fusion anymore, but NAND and Flash is critical of what they're doing. They've built a whole software platform. We're going to talk a lot about XCP during the next day in the house and a day and a half and Acropolis, but Nutanix is the leader from a revenue standpoint when it comes to this hyperconverged space, what we called ServerSAN, Wikibon put out the definition in the first market revenue and forecast in this space. Nutanix is the one that, the other startups are chasing and the big guys are slinging some challenges and punches at. So it's excited to be here on the ground to go through all the technology, talk to a lot of practitioners and the partner community, it's exciting stuff. So one of those big guys is VMware. Essentially what Nutanix is doing in my short take here is they are accelerating all the things that VMware is slow rolling, right? VMware is trying to freeze the market in certain spaces and Nutanix is pushing that. And so that's kind of creating an interesting tension in the relationship. And so we're going to talk about that. But before, and I want to talk about the announcements and it'll become clear to our audience sort of why there's some friction going on there. But before I do that, I want to talk about, Dheeraj talked about his three H's, be hungry, be honest and be humble. And he's a humble individual and this is a humble company. And so we saw that and then we also heard from Vinod Kosla and Ravi Marta who was with Lightspeed. Vinod Kosla of course is very famous, needs to know introduction. And they just talked about why they were interested in Nutanix and Vinod Kosla was very articulate. He said that he had not seen a dramatic change in architecture since Sun Microsystems. And he remembers the days when Sun was getting pressure to make itself look like VT 100 terminals and look like a deck vacs. And Sun made a decision, a groundbreaking decision at that moment to push back and stick to its knitting and using that analogy as Nutanix and not trying to mimic what's being done in the old ET invoked VM where he invoked EMC. And then Ravi Marta used the term called the doom loop. And what he meant by that is getting sucked into the vortex of incremental R&D investment which every large company does. We certainly see that from EMC. They are the masters at incremental investment but of course EMC is also very good at tucking in innovation through acquisition. So it's not as though these old line companies are doomed stew. So that was sort of the setup before we get into the announcement. I just want to get your take on that. Dave, I thought that was great. Dheeraj also said he wants his employees and his customers to make sure they stay passionate and paranoid. And Dave, I worked at EMC for 10 years and one of the books that it was originally Mike Rutgers and then Joe Tucci of course quoted after is Andy Grove Seminole, only the paranoid survive. So EMC is always looking at that nest disruptive. EMC is a player in the hyperconverged space and of course being an owner of VM where they're there. So, but back to your comments on Vanu Coastal. I mean he was there at the foundation of the file system revolution. And what was Nutanix? Nutanix's foundation was taking that Google file system, rolling that out into the enterprise. So taking those learnings from hyper scale, what Nutanix calls web scale, bringing that to the enterprise. I've talked to the people at Nutanix that came from Google, from Facebook and it's really those lessons from the newer massive companies. It's about distributed architectures. I love the first time we interviewed Dheeraj which was two and a half years ago at VMworld 2012. It wasn't a discussion of convergence or what's going on in server storage networks. It was about distributed architectures and applications and the modernization of IT. And if Nutanix can stick to that message and really deliver on that, it's going to help move us from kind of those legacy environments onto the more modern microservice cloud native type environments. But today, Dave, I mean the application sitting on most Nutanix, it's still, it's VMware's the hypervisor, it's the same VMs that sat in a sand just coming in a new operational model. So it's VDI, it's Exchange, and increasingly some of the more mission critical applications. Dave, when you look at a VMware environment, number one thing that's sitting on top of VMware is Microsoft and therefore Microsoft apps sitting on there. Yeah, there's some Oracle and there's some other things like that. And of course VDI, being an application of Citrix and VMware there, but it's those applications. So one of the big things we haven't talked about yet is the play of what Nutanix is doing and how that interacts with Microsoft. Because Microsoft's got huge affinity with the applications. And going forward, we're going to have to dig into that application side a bunch, which we heard EMC talk about at EMC World and Nutanix is helping to push up the stack with containers. So Stu, one of the things that Nutanix is doing is what John Furrier calls inter-clouding. They're sort of pushing at that ability to go across clouds. So Nutanix, a lot of talk about invisible. Now we've heard Chad Sackett talk about invisibility for a long, long time. Nutanix is actually making that happen, not only at the storage layer, but also the virtualization layer. And ultimately their vision is to make the cloud invisible. So I want to get into some of the announcements. You've just published a piece of research that we're going to do. David, just a quick comment on that. A Sunil Poti, I actually think summed it up real well. He said, complex is competent, but simple is genius. So I really like that line because it's one thing to just put a layer of abstraction, which was the old kind of storage virtualization, which we know Dave, you know, moved us forward a little bit incrementally, but we would to really radically change something to make it invisible stuff. So let's do a quick rundown of the announcements then we'll come back and cover them throughout. So Acropolis Prism, there's a Nutanix Sizer, there's a native scale out file server, there's a storage heavy fabric, there's this thing called flash pinning. There's native iSCSI, there's erasure coding, there's Nutanix XCP, there's container creation as fast as VMs, there's a new search capability. I don't know if that's Lucene or not, but so, wow, all kinds of announcements that got increasingly more rowdy clapping. It started out as a golf clapping, by the end there were hoot hoots. So Stu, give us your take on the announcements in the short time. I mean, wow, just so many pieces to go through, Dave. What Nutanix calls their XCP portfolio, which is the extreme computing platform, is really made up of Acropolis, which we'll go into some more in Prism. So Prism is their management tool that they've had now, for I believe about a year, but Acropolis is the thing that's going to get the most conversation here at the show and impact for our community here. Because first of all, what it is, is there's Acropolis Hypervisor, which is built with KVM technology. But what we heard from the Nutanix people is that base KVM, storage isn't great, and security needs some work, and just spinning it up fast and simple needed some work. So when you buy a Nutanix platform, it does not ship with VMware. And therefore, Nutanix wanted something out of the box that could work well and also save some money. I mean, people, the elephant in the room there is that there's been lots of companies that say that VMware has too much power in the industry and is getting too much money for the hypervisor, which in many ways has been commoditized. So if we can help. Should it be free? Yeah. Hypervisor should be free. And even VMware has been moving towards that direction and shifting their move, but yeah, absolutely. And if you look at the overall cost, I remember a year ago, we talked to one of the GMs from Microsoft, and we said, aren't you still really getting a lot of price on licensing? And he said, come on, licensing is 6% of the overall IT budget, incrementally us versus everybody else that's not there. So if Microsoft isn't too expensive from a licensing standpoint, VMware probably isn't either. And I tell you, Dave, customers I talked to, they're mostly happy with VMware. Sure, there's still those rumblings back from the VTACs, but there's a lot going on there. So Acropolis, big thing to look about there, Dave, is it's going to give the ability to be able to give mobility. So step one is if I want to do Hyper-V, big thing is we talked about, or KVM based Acropolis from ESX, we can do that. And down in the future, we can switch containers, we can switch cloud, a lot more we want to dig in there as we go through the show. All right, Stu, good, quick summary. We'll be digging into each of these announcements and unpacking them. We're here, we're surrounded by palm trees, steamy Miami in many, many ways. It's a great location, awesome for inaugural conferences. And how about this set, Dave? Yeah, nice set. So we're going all day today, most of the day tomorrow. So Stu and I will be back. We've got a number of guests. D. Raj, CEO of Nutanix is coming on. We've got VCs, we've got practitioners, we've got pundits, we've got bloggers, we've got Matt Eastwood coming on from IDC. So a full lineup for you here from NextConf, hashtag NextConf, tweet that out. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after this brief break.