 Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome to Las Vegas, everybody. We're here at the Wynn Hotel. We're live at the Nutanix .next hashtag next conf. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Nutanix innovations, the customers, the stories, the evolution of scale, out, cloud. Nutanix, Stu started, I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. They started this whole meme of hyper-convergence, actually started in the customer base, sort of followed on the converged infrastructure themes. And now you see Nutanix growing like crazy. They'll do probably over $400 million this year in revenue. They're a privately held company, but they filed their S1, so we have a little bit of visibility and information on them. Probably do over $600 million this year in bookings based on what it looks like in the first half and the second quarter. But basically you see them, Stu, expanding their TAM beyond what everybody else in the industry is sort of pivoting toward hyper-converged infrastructure. You now see Nutanix evolving its TAM into enterprise cloud, what we call true private cloud. The attributes of public cloud on-prem. Last year we did the inaugural conference at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. 900 people this year, 2,500 people at the win, beautiful venue. I would say, Stu, they're going to outgrow that next year, but so Stu, welcome. Great to be co-hosting with you again. Yeah, thanks, Dave. So, you know, the Nutanix show, it's a fun show. There's good energy. You know, there's a lot of discussions that infrastructure really has become pretty boring, but in the infrastructure space, this is one of the most exciting things going on. Nutanix is really trying to make things invisible. They started really with that storage layer. Last year, they added in some of the virtualization layer with the Acropolis hypervisor, they call AHV now, and really they're trying to move all the way up to be enterprise cloud is the messaging this year. We're going to have Howard Ting, the CMO on, shortly to help, you give us some of the key messages coming out of the show. A lot of announcements, everything from multi-hypervisor, raising Microsoft's sum, we're just containers fit into this, you know, bare metal, you know, so many different pieces to build this out. So many people looked at hyperconvergence and they said, oh, it's this one little block, and of course it's much more than that. When we wrote our server scan, you know, definition and forecast, we think this is a wave leveraging a lot of technologies. What we see in the hyperscale environments, distributed architectures, it's really that software-defined storage space, and that's where Nutanix is leveraging it. And as you said, they're the market leader in revenue for hyperconverged infrastructure, but they're moving well beyond that, to as you said, virtualization, cloud and beyond. So the seminal moment in this, one of them anyway, in this company's tenure, we first introduced Nutanix to our cube audience at VMworld, and at the time it was like, okay, hey, another infrastructure player, hopping on the VMware bandwagon, riding the coattails of the VMware ecosystem. Nutanix made a decision several years ago, not to OEM and become a reseller of VMware. Unlike, for instance, HP and IBM, which used to, in Dell, even, which used to brag on the amount of VMware licenses that it would resell, you're now hearing those companies sort of change their tune. Nutanix made a decision not to OEM the VMware platform, and that created a little bit of friction. But what it also created is an opportunity for Nutanix to create, essentially, its own hypervisor platform, Acropolis, which we learned last year in talking to a number of customers, very excited about the capabilities of being able to move workloads off of VMware onto more cost-effective platforms. Where it makes sense, maybe not the mission critical stuff, but avoiding the V-tax, as they talk about. So this is a huge theme of this conference and the practitioners at this conference, the number one clap, and it was more than a golf clap than the audience today, and there were several, was no longer do you need to log into vCenter to manage your infrastructure. You can manage everything from the single pane of glass at Nutanix, that's what Cineal Potty said, the chief product officer of Nutanix. And so that got the biggest applause. I've likened this conference to .conf from Splunk, from the early days of Service Now, from Tableau, where the audience enthusiasm is genuine, Stu. What's your take? Yeah, absolutely, and you talked to things like multi-hypervisor management, it's a little bit of a future roadmap that's going to come in the asterisk release, 4.7 is kind of the current release, but what matters in the stack and what's sticky, Dave? When we first looked at Nutanix, God, the first time I looked at Nutanix it was because, hey, they were using Fusion IO cards in there, and we knew that Flash was going to change architectures in common REO and Nutanix were a couple of early providers that were leveraging that technology. Today, they don't use Fusion IO, they use a few different Flash technologies. Inside from a compute standpoint, they use SuperMicro. Today, they OEM, Lenovo, they OEM with Dell, there's discussion about, hey, what about Cisco? There's a CRN report saying that they're going to maybe meet in the channel for that kind of environment, maybe even HP, so the server maybe doesn't matter, and Nutanix thinks that the hypervisor just becomes a feature also, so they're not trying to become the market leader in the hypervisor with Acropolis, they're just trying to say, hey, here's the KVM based option, it ships native on our platform, if you want to save money, if you want to have good basic solid functionality that has security built in, has ease of use and simplicity built in, you don't need to have that extra layer of paying for and managing separately the environment, they want to be a platform, platform might be overused, but Nutanix gave why they think that they will be a platform for infrastructure going forward. So the company's reason for being is really simplification, simplifying infrastructure, they talk about making infrastructure invisible at Wikibon, we've quantified that between $200 and $300 billion is going to shift from non-productive IT labor, non-differentiated IT labor into what we call vendor R&D, whether it's software defined or appliances, that's a shift that Nutanix is accelerating, we're going to be talking about that, there's a lot of stuff going on, there's deals with Microsoft around Azure, there's native Docker support, Docker persistence, all kinds of things that we're going to be discussing today, plus the roadmap, so keep right there, wall-to-wall coverage of Nutanix.next, hashtag nextconf, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship production, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we'll be right back after this short break.