 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017. It's theCUBE's coverage, three days wall to wall. On our third day, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Next guest is Pi, who's the Vice President of Alliance's Business Development, NewtonX. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, happy to be here. We cover your user conference, but we're here at VMworld, which is VMware's conference. You guys have a relationship. This is multiple years here. Just give a history as you guys now, a public company, congratulations. Thank you very much. It's been almost a year now. How about the history with VMware and VMworld? Absolutely, I mean, I think our company was built on the fact that virtualization is going to be the future of the data center, right? And if you look at the evolution over the last few years, that's been validated. We've been a partner with VMware since almost inception of the company when we came out in 2010, 2011. And in 2011, and we're now being at, this is the seventh year, and we continue to see great momentum with our customers and our partners for that matter. And as a seventh year, we are very much aligned with the world of where the world is going. Hybrid cloud, a multi-cloud world. And if you look at what we've done with our platform, be it hyperconverge or the evolution of where that's going with our world of enterprise cloud OS, we see a lot of synergy in terms of how VMware's built its approach to a software-defined data center and where we see the world going, hey, everything needs to be software-defined and the architecture that's underneath that needs to be invisible to customers, right? So I think that that is aligning very well, so it's happy to be here and our customers are very happy to see us here and see both of us working closer together. I mean, it's certainly been interesting to see the evolution of the partnership with VMware. I mean, when you guys first came out, it was like, wow, hot new company, come on in, infrastructure company. And then people realized, wow, this hyperconverged infrastructure thing is really hot. We should be doing that, too. Remember, we had D Rajan right after the VX Rack announcement and he was welcoming it in, validation, of course. First of all, it's true and that's what any smart CEO would say. But then it got very interesting when you guys announced Acropolis and as everybody was pivoting to hyperconverged, you were pivoting to cloud. So what's behind that trend? How is that going? What are customers telling you? No, it's a great analogy of how we see the world, right? If you look at how Nutanix germinated early on 2009, there were a couple of key trends in the market where public cloud was starting to become a very, very strong direction of how customers wanted to go, right? And if you look at what that direction meant, it was simplicity. So I can transact through a single API, I can make infrastructure invisible, so I can therefore focus on the business and the business application that drive my business. And that's been the direction that we've taken. So how do you make things simple for customers? And hyperconverge is an element of driving that simplicity, right? At an infrastructure level, we drive that simplicity and we've taken that theme and driven that all the way through where we believe that, you know, if you look at our fundamental theme as a company, it's about enterprise cloud OS, which is customers like cloud, but at the same time, the direction of what they want to go is not just take my applications, take it off-premise into a public cloud, but the benefits of what public cloud means, I want it in my data center, right? So I can start small, grow at my space, get my, you know, have everything simple to deploy. And that's been the direction we've continued to focus on and that directionally has provided us the true north of how we build our operations and stuff. So on the customer side, I want to get your take on something because you guys have been very customer focused. First of all, you've been great technology, you had a unique thing that no one saw, by the way, when we first interviewed D-Rod, we're like, this is going to be big. And just like my customers, Andy Jassy at Amazon, the big winners are either ones that are misunderstood at the beginning. And then it becomes clear, why don't we think of that? Well, he did all the work. But you guys have to be customer focused. Absolutely. The success of VMware, the success of Amazon, the success of you guys is to be customer focused. So I've got to ask you, what are the VMware customers asking you, Nutanix, to do for them? What are some of the use cases? Where are you winning? And what does it mean for their customers? That's a great question. I think for us, the fundamental driver of what we try to do for customers, right, is how do we make things simple for them? Right? Simplicity, if you look at what we do is, for example, I'll give a simple analogy, right? One of the ways that we help our customers simplify infrastructure deployments is making a simple upgrade. So we have this concept of one-click upgrades, right? So what does that mean? What that means is, if a customer has an ESX running at, let's say, you know, five dot five, and wants to move to six dot zero, the ability for them to therefore do that non-destructively, so with a one-click upgrade at three p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, they can now upgrade the infrastructure, like upgrades the hypervisor upgrades our software stack, upgrades the flash drives inside the system, and that ability to simplify a deployment of a VM or infrastructure becomes very easy for them, right? So when they're running vSphere, then they say, look, I'm going to enable NSX. That ability to therefore make that simpler is the direction we want to make. Make go, right? So how do you make things simpler when they're running VM or environment? How do you make it simple to deploy an EC application? Which is why, you know, a customer has a horizon view and they want to deploy Nutanix, or deploy Hyperconverge, we make it extremely simple to do that. So you can start small, and Gristow go from 300 to 3000 to 30,000 with just a plug-and-play architecture and a one-click upgrade of the software stack that sits on top of the infrastructure. So that is simplicity we want to bring to our customers. So Pai, we had an interesting, Stu and I, John, we were at dot next, interesting conversation with Sunil, Poti, and he had said at the time, go back, you guys were doing really well and you could have exited the market, he said. We chose not to. We said, let's roll the dice and really go for it. Okay, and so then that, of course, put pressure on you and your colleagues. You in particular, as a business development executive, for TAM expansion, of course, the CEO as well. Very important that you now, if you're really going to go for the next level, you've got to expand your TAM. And that took several forms. I mean, there was the acropolis piece that got you into the cloud and multi-cloud business. That's clear. There were also an increased number of partnerships. Obviously the Dell partnership, Lenovo partnership, IBM with Pitchiano's group, so very strategic relationships, and then of course other go-to-market activities. I wonder if you could talk about that TAM expansion strategy as a sort of individual who was at the heart of that and take us through that process. Yeah, I mean, nobody can do this alone nowadays, right? It's a League of Nations methodology. You have to live in a cooperative world. You have to find a way to grow your market in a way that you can't do it alone, right? And we recognize that early on, right? And Dheeraj, with the way he's built the business, it's about you can't do it alone. I mean, we're a small company back in 2010. Yeah, we have the vision, but how do you execute it in a way we can take that vision, deliver it to thousands and thousands of customers, right? And we have a multifaceted go-to-market strategy if you want to call it that, right? We depend very heavily on our partners to make us successful, right? Be that, you know, channel partners that have built a business on Nutanix, be that the series is the four sides of the world or companies like that, or be that, you know, as a segmented part of it is ROEM strategy, right? So when you have a software that customers, that simplifies customers' lives, you want to get to them as quickly as possible, right? And I think Dell was early on in seeing that vision and saying, okay, you know what? I want to bring that value to customers. And Dell, I know what jumped on early on. Dell about four years ago, almost, I'm not thinking about how long it's been. And they know about a couple of years ago. And really, it allows us to reach a larger swath of customers globally much earlier and give them the technology that allowed them to differentiate themselves over the other who we see them as themselves as their competitors, right? So it gives them that differentiating factor. So it's a marriage of equals from a technology perspective and from a distribution perspective, right? If you look at what we did in terms of our technology partnership ecosystem, right? Customers recognize that we're not the only game in town. They want us to partner with their strategic vendors, technology partners. So we built a very strong technology ecosystem, you know, I think a couple of months I interviewed Laura Padilla on my team around what the technology ecosystem does for our customers. Every customer conversation is less about, gee, I like Nutanix and here's what I want you to do more of, which is obviously what they would love to do, but at the same time, right? They respect what we do with VMware. What are we doing more with them? It's a multi-vendor world. It's a multi-vendor world. There's no one company that will dominate anymore. Correct, correct, exactly. Tell us about the channel, how you guys distribute, obviously you rely on partners. Absolutely. On the sales side, as a direct, indirect, what's the mix of business? So we don't sell direct, right? We only go through a channel partner. So we have a very strong channel partner ecosystem. So no direct sales, no one takes orders direct. No, we are sales guys work very closely with the channel partners and they work very closely both with our OEMs and our channel partners and both of them, you know, for all of our OEM partners, they need to work with us when they engage into a customer conversation so that they can provide the best solution possible. So they just go in, rogue, and say, hey, you know what, here's Nutanix and that creates conflict with the customer. That's channel conflicts, it's a disaster. Absolutely, so we maintain that. How about professional services, Dave? You push that out to the partners as well? As much as possible, we have our own. So we have a services arm because at the same time, customers say, look, you know, if I've got Nutanix and who's the best, you know, leader in understanding what our technology is. So we also have a services arm that allows us to lead with a conversation but we train our channel partners with that same enablement technology to say, you know what, we can do it on our own but we want you to lead that charge because as, you know, channel partners lead a lot on services to drive their revenue, right? So it's not just about product and margin, it's more about services revenue they can drive at an annuity level. So we try the balancing act where we can lead the charge in technology for our customers but at the same time, lead our channel partners to take that burden on and therefore drive value for them as well. So while it's a multi-vendor world and we certainly recognize that, again, I come back to the decision that you guys made to be a leader, we sort of had a similar conversation with Robin Matlock. If you look at VMware, they want to be a leader. You have a particular opinion and point of view in the marketplace and you're putting that forth and you really want to be the center point of management for multi-clouds from a data management perspective. And you're certainly growing from the point of your core customer base. That's a big ambition. It is a big ambition. I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit. Absolutely. I mean, our ambition is to look at, if you look at the public cloud, five, seven years ago, you just brought it up earlier, right? The ambition is very aggressive, right? And similarly, if you look at our ambition, we believe that that methodology of making things simple for our customers, right, does not stop at the hyper-converged world, right? It starts bleeding into all the things that make operational complexity a burden for our customers so they can focus on their business, right? So when you start bleeding into what that means, it means addressing some of the layers that make things complex for customers, right? So if you take your smartphone, right? All these hundreds of applications you may load on, those are our individual components that make your life easier. But how do you bring that simplicity where you're the one clicking and do things, right? So that's the germination of our methodology of the public cloud is transacted through a single API, right? But in the world of enterprise, you have hundreds of different vendors that need to work together to deliver the single API, right? So some of the new technologies we've launched, some of the new products we've launched is to bring that simplicity back into like, be it at an application level, be it at an orchestration level, or be it an infrastructure level. So all those elements need to work together through a single API, for example, to make that simple so customers can say, look, I've got Nutanix, but Nutanix is not the only infrastructure I have. Nutanix is not just only, you know, VMware is not the only hypervisor I have. So how do I now bring that bridge together so back to the multi-vendor world, I can transact through Dell, but I want to buy VMware, but run it on Nutanix, and use this orchestration layer and go to the public cloud in a hybrid cloud world, and I've got offices in oil rigs that need to be treated the same level as somebody sitting in data center, right? It's a complex world, and you need to have an opinionated design at some level to bring that simplicity in and then divert outside from there through an API-based approach to say, you know what, we're not the only game in town. It needs to make sure that other companies can interoperate, but make things simple when you are in an opinionated world. And let the customer decide, bringing your simplicity mantra to that world, and say, hey, we think we're the best, here's why, you know, try it and see for yourself. Exactly, right? And so if you look at the new world, the new, in the tagline is one, and one OS, one click, right? That one click drives a lot of our methodology in making things simple, and one OS drives the ability for us to make that simple across the infrastructure stack, which bleeds from the public cloud approach to what people have started to like. Awesome. Well, Pai, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the insight. Thank you very much. Thanks for the time again. Great to see you again. Great to see you again. Of course, Newton, it's a lot of coverage on siliconangle.com and wikibon.com on YouTube. A lot of great content from the next conferences. Big plug for your show in Nice this fall, too. You guys are going to have the international conference. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, Dot Next, Nice, it's our second year in Europe and our third conference, and it's in Nice November 6th through the 9th, and we look forward to having all of our customers there and learn more about Nutanix and where we're going. And Stu will be there to cover it. Yes. And you guys, just to put a plug on for that, you guys do a good job, great content, and nice digs. You always have it in a great place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're a customer, I want to be a customer. They have a good deal going on there. Check out Nutanix. Thanks, Pai, for coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you for being part of that journey as well. All right, just the CUBE coverage of EMworld 2017, Nutanix, great pioneer in the space, under the great entrepreneur leader, D.Rajpanday. More CUBE coverage after this short break. Thank you very much.