 Welcome back and happy to have a special presentation of the Cube here from our Palo Alto studios Welcome to being back to the program multi-time guest Howard Ting who's the CMO of Nutanix And we're gonna be talking about Nutanix dot-next 2017 Washington, DC at the beautiful Gaylord Howard. Thanks for joining me great to be here again, Stu. Thanks. All right So, you know boy, you know not a lot gone on in the last year, you know company win IPO You've added to your family, you know lots of things going on So tell us what's new in your life. Yeah, it's been a pretty memorable 12 months Actually, it's been a memorable four and a half years for me at Nutanix It's I joined the company when I was doing a couple million and probably had less than a hundred employees and now we're Approaching 3,000 employees and we're doing close to a billion run rate and sales And so you you can imagine a lot has happened and a lot of a lot of things to be proud of for sure Yeah, so so we've talked to D. Raj a couple of times like before the IPO right after the IPO What I want to get your viewpoint is you know, is there you know more magnifying glasses on you Do you get more calls or you know people calling every day about like every move-in change on Wall Street? Or what's it like on the inside? Sure. Yeah, I mean it is different. It is different But I think and for most people it's not that different, you know for our sellers for the people who work at Our headquarters office for people who are supporting our customers. The day-to-day is no different I think the there is this quarterly Cadence now obviously as a public company 90 day shot clock perhaps. Yeah, there's a shot clock But we were always off. We've been operating like that for probably Five to six quarters before going public where we were on this case. So I think there's a little bit more of that Cadence and attention to results on a quarterly basis and obviously more careful planning and things like that I would say from a sales and marketing standpoint I think the brand has gotten a huge lift from going public and the awareness about Nutanix And also the category and the disruption we're creating is at an all-time high. So yeah It's been definitely a big help in that regard. Yes So you won't need to do a funny video on the street asking people what Nutanix is. I still want to do that Yeah, it'll be fun. See if I could find some Trump Impersonators and you know, I might you know, I might have a little bit of a twist Well, all right. You always like to bring, you know, some interesting things Let's get get to the preview of the show itself. It's a third year doing the show First year was in Miami second year was in Las Vegas 118 degrees So, you know, how are you gonna keep the heat in the show in DC? Well, I think the heat at this conference is always the attendees and the content You know, it always comes down to the people you're gonna spend time with and the great content You're gonna absorb. So this year, I think we have something like 70 plus sessions over a hundred speakers and as with every dot-next It's always about customers presenting, you know, our users presenting what they've learned how they're using it What has gone wrong for them? You know pitfalls to avoid things like that. So just awesome content and That's first and foremost What's always made it a great event and of course we like to sprinkle in all the little extra stuff that you expect You know, we have this thing called NX files where under NDA, you know Kind of like leave your phones at the door kind of thing where we will show all the advanced R&D that we're doing First of like customers You're gonna give us a preview of all that here, right? Can't give you too much of a preview, but I can tell you that it's something that you definitely want to check out when you're there So we do stuff like that. We have a bunch of other programs around the event We have a partner summit or a partner track for our resellers and our channel partners We have an alliances track. We have a customer advisory board. So there are just a bunch of programs. It's not one event It's like five or six events all packaged into a couple days It's a pretty intense couple days and we're excited the cube. Thank you for bringing us back there One of the things you guys do do really well and we always appreciate it shows is we get to talk to the practitioners So we'd love to talk to the people that are playing it I've had the pleasure of talking to you know service providers to enterprise customers to smaller customers And I'm assuming in DC you're gonna have some government customers We will have a few. I don't know if they're gonna be able to talk on the cube. Yeah, but we'll certainly try Yeah, government, you know the US federal government's always been a fantastic vertical for us One of the reasons why I decided to bring the conference the DC is to show that team some love because they've been such a big Contributor to our company success and we're doing so many interesting things, you know one just quick side note We're now partnering with the company called class Who have built a hardened? System a platform that runs our software and this data center is being parachuted into Battle fronts and it's a really interesting use case and and you know There's so many things like that that we're doing with the with the federal agencies that Hopefully will get some of those stories out at the conference. Okay, um Yeah, but beyond the conference itself. Can you give us an update kind of partnerships, you know shifts in the industry? You know look there's been a couple of acquisitions in the storage space And of course you guys are you know not a storage company But you know overlap and play against some of those. Yeah, what are you seeing these days? Yeah, clearly. I think all the big systems vendors are now comfortable lean leaning in on HCI You know, I think HCI has become almost like a de facto starting point for a conversation about any sort of new infrastructure Deployment, you know, whether it's a private cloud initiative a data center refresh, etc And so I think there's no there's far less resistance to the concept of HCI today I would say also that the market is still trying to understand All the differences between the different HCI options because you have some gen one type products like Cisco hyper flex you have some much more advanced products like VxRail And then you have products like new tanks that are much more than HCI much more than hyper coverage You know, we we market and message as an enterprise cloud platform or enterprise cloud operating system And we do networking and security. We do cloud orchestration. We have built in virtualization So we do so much more than HCI. So our Our conference is not a conference about hyper-converged our conference is about how to build enterprise clouds And I think it's the only conference We would argue or it may be the best conference where you can meet the practitioners building enterprise clouds, you know It's it's interesting, you know, we've definitely, you know, we've watched that messaging resonates with a lot of things We've been saying and hearing from our community on the research side We called it true private cloud as well as just kind of what is that hybrid definition I was just you know, I've been up in San Francisco attending the Google next conference. There's a Nutanix booth there I was at AWS reinvent, you know, there was a Nutanix booth there How how do you guys see your relationship with kind of the public clouds and kind of private cloud hybrid cloud? How does that fit into your overall message? Yeah, great question You know for us an enterprise cloud is the cloud and the cloud has to stretch across boundaries, you know We're in the future. We don't see a real delineation between public and private You know in in the end state if there's ever such a thing, you know, whatever it is three five years out We think that the workloads and apps will move very freely between borders, you know between walls of a data center So it's all going to happen with one-click simplicity and delight like we believe we can deliver So we think that the real hybrid scenarios. They're not fulfilled today, you know, there's a lot of promise There's a lot of talk. There's a lot of hype There's no real execution of true hybrid scenarios I can tell you and this is my one little nugget that I'm going to drop for you as a preview I can tell you that you know hybrid is an area that you should expect for us to make some announcements around Coming this year because that's an area where I think there's a massive opportunity for a company like Nutanix to do it Well and and and own a great share of the real estate. Okay. Well Howard I want to give you the kind of the last word on the conference itself I'm sure you've got an audacious goal for the team as to how many people are going to be there You know, what's the pitch to get people to say, you know go to Nutanix comm slash next click that button now You know come join us at the end of June. Yeah, I'd say, you know, it's it's the best place to come if you're Thinking about the future of your IT operation, you know, and I want to make it as broad a statement as that It's not just about, you know, what you're doing with your, you know particular piece of your stack It's about thinking about your real strategy, you know long term. What am I trying to do for what is my cloud strategy? right and if anyone out there is wondering about that this is the conference to go to because We're going to have conversations about hybrid cloud. We're going to have conversations about how much of my How many of my workload should I put in the public cloud? We're going to have lots of conversations with practitioners that are building the private clouds today There's going to be a lot of rich content. So I think this is the place to go if you're thinking about cloud and And you really don't know where you're going to end up whether you're going to be mostly end up in the public or private But we think that's where most people are today. They're not sure, you know There's a lot there's a lot of boomeranging too You know folks that have started in the public and now they're trying to bring workloads back If you're in that scenario because the public is too expensive This would be a great place because we already have a few customers presenting on why they brought workloads back And how they were able to do that. Yeah So, uh, you know not to just be a blatant plug, but we go to a lot of shows Um, I tell you the community people that are at the show are great Um and something that I don't get at every show not only do you kind of get to understand the technology But you've got some good thought leaders and not just you know technology industry leaders But just kind of thought leaders in general talking about innovation talking about the future I see you've got you know, you know founders and CEOs and you know professors and you know authors that i've read And have seen that at previous shows so always excited to have places not only that I can learn but expand the mind So, you know, we're excited as I mentioned to the audience on newtannix.com slash slash next Is where you can go register for the event of course check out silken angle dot tv For our upcoming events including the newtannix show and uh, look forward to seeing you at many of the shows up Howard thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Steve and thank you for watching the cube We'll be back with more coverage here and uh, you're watching the cube