 But from New Orleans, Louisiana, hit the cue. Covering .NEXT CONFERENCE 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error in shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end of the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Those words by Theodore Roosevelt were in this morning's keynote by Dr. Brené Brown. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix.NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. Here to break down, give our critiques, as well as understand that Nutanix, while they are a public company, they've been striving and succeeding greatly. 5,500 people here at this conference, very enthusiastic, great party last night. So Keith, we talked about it on our show open yesterday. It's been your first show, got to talk to a bunch of customers, talked to a bunch of partners. Give us impressions and, you know, overall experience. So, you know, you can't go to a show like this but not get hero numbers. 70,000 people in the Nutanix community program, 61,000 certified individuals. Customers making statements such as Nutanix, humble company, Nutanix not filling in title to the sale, needing to work for the dollar. Customers extremely excited about the announcements, the direction of the company. Four key core areas I saw from a technology perspective in which they made some really aggressive announcements and bets, so you know what, this has been a very high energy conference. Yeah, absolutely. Talk about, from a financial standpoint, they're doing well. Wall Street's been rewarding them greatly for the move to move to software only. Companies over $9 billion in market cap. Amazing. Adding over 1,000 customers a quarter. Very good for the space that they're playing in. Things like their file system, AFS, their fastest growing products. Building on that base infrastructure, but then yes, as you said, bold direction. They've got the kind of three axisies that they're trying to build on. Build out hypervisor support, build out cloud support. We're going to talk about how we think, you know, where Nutanix fits in this cloud world. Building out their software portfolio. You know, where do they have IP? Where are they growing? They've done four acquisitions so far in the software space. Some of those are starting to tow fruit. We did interviews with the former CEO of Minjar and of NetSIL and... Bot metric. Yeah, that's the NetSIL Bot metric piece there. So products that are now, some of them are shipping and as well as giving some vision. They had their first SaaS product in Beam. Really interesting. Something that really was targeted at AWS and Azure. You know, not the data center, but they're trying to make that hybrid hybrid message as well as giving some of the vision. Nutanix era is a big directional piece. Project Sherlock, of course, the big brains here working on that. Really interesting to dig in. Edge and IoT. So a lot of pieces there, what's your take? You know what? I think I'm a bit overwhelmed actually, which is a great thing. You look at Comm was over the past couple of months their Comm platform was evened out by adding micro segmentation, which against their biggest competitor in VMware was an essential piece. They've been unabashed for going after it. You know what? AHAV can now compete head to head with VMware just as long as you don't need memory over commit and metro clustering, then AHAV, the term that they use was game on. So Nutanix is, you know, we talked to Derach a couple of years on theCUBE and asked him, you know what is Nutanix a platform company? He said, you know what? No, I'm too humble to accept that mantle of being a platform company. There's a lot of work to do. You look out onto the show floor 80 partners and sponsors who are all part, who are all offering solutions tied to AHAV, which we talked about a little bit, a lot of adoption, but it doesn't seem like there's much VMware market penetration instilling customers from VMware as much as Hyper-V. The lot of customers we talked to, we said, you know, we tried Hyper-V on Nutanix, not so much, so we went to AHAV. Yeah, great point. And I felt a few years ago, the conversation wasn't about Hyper-V when you talked about Microsoft. It wasn't the, for years, it was when will it catch up to what VMware is doing? Look, VMware is still dominant in the space. Customers here, lots of them are using VMware. Yes, there's that tension between VMware and Nutanix, but Nutanix, do they poke and prod a little bit at some things? Yes, but at this show, very much focusing on what they're doing and focusing on their customers, not sending pot shots or anything like that. But when it comes to Microsoft, you're right, Keith, there were a number of customers I talked to that were like, well, I'm a Microsoft shop and we know what applications used to live on VMware. You know, number one thing was always Microsoft. Many of them, I tried Hyper-V, didn't really like the experience and therefore it was a smooth path to go over to AHAV. Lots of customers that are doing both VMware and AHAV and sorting that out and it's like, oh, well over time, if Nutanix becomes 80, 90, even some of them getting towards 100% of their deployments, AHAV becomes a bigger piece of the portfolio. And you know, we thought that this whole multi-hypervisor argument was over like, you know what, just go with one hypervisor. A lot of Nutanix customers are showing that multi-hypervisor is a legit way to go. We haven't ran it to anyone who said, you know, we're having management pains, running AHAV side-by-side with VMware vSphere. Yeah, I would like to see from Nutanix more partnerships with Microsoft though. You talk Azure, absolutely huge growth, you know, number two out there. Yes, they support it, but you know, of course they have, you know, much more showing at the Amazon show. They've got a strong partnership with Google. Got to highlight that with the Brian Stevens interview and know that later this year as I, you know, really starts to roll out that we will see much more of that. But Azure, not only on the public cloud piece, but Azure Stack is starting to grow. I've been talking to, you know, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Cisco, all of them have pent up demands, service providers that are starting to roll out. Azure Stack, and while Azure Stack really is kind of a closed ecosystem there, I think there is opportunity for Nutanix to play in there. I expect them to hear it from their customers, would love them to do more with Microsoft. We heard from customers that they'd actually love to hear Nutanix do more with Red Hat and in general, build that ecosystem. Yes, show floor, it's growing, it's vibrant, but absolutely it's always, well, more. Of course, we always, and I think we get our friends that Nutanix always pokes us about, you know, saying positive, but it is a positive. They're a software company now, and as a software company, you have to integrate with other software companies, services, the Azure Stack thing. While, you know, it's mainly a hardware play for companies like Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, there has to be software integration. The folks with the Google and Nutanix partnership did a really great job of doing push button, at least showing us on stage, push button deployments of VMs from Xi to nested Nutanix instances in the cloud. This is Nutanix in the cloud. That won't probably play with Azure and the Azure Stack, so Nutanix really needs to figure out a way to get into that relationship with Microsoft. Yeah, it's true simplicity takes genius, is a quote that I had out of this show in the early years, and Nutanix will make a bold claim. Oh, database migration, we're going to make that really easy, well, show me. Anybody that's worked with databases. That's like saying DR is easy. Yeah, getting the stores from one point to another is easy, processes, not so much. Some of the Project Sherlock, oh yeah, all that TensorFlow, Kubernetes, functions as a service. We're going to make it push button easy so that we'll make that invisible. How much is a distraction? What's in the weeds? The networking, there's so many pieces in there that love the vision. Of course, customers want to simplify, but we want to talk to the customers and understand what works, what still needs to be tweaked. Where do they have to build out some services, partnerships even more than they've done today to go further? What have you been seeing and hearing? So, Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company. I've poked at the whole cloud marketing term. Matter of fact, on Twitter, I'll read this. Cloud really, no AI, no databases as a service, no serverless, doesn't even have a presence at Kubernetes events. Fake cloud story for IT. You know what, let's pick that apart a little bit. DB as a service, they announced basically yesterday. That's their AI, Satyam got up and said a really nice story with Sherlock. They're absolutely looking at it. Kubernetes integration, ACS 2.0 will come out the gate as a Kubernetes managed distribution. They announced XI integration with Kubernetes and push button. Now you may pick on the cloud part. The Nutanix still very much talks to the infrastructure group. Their customers are the infrastructure group and you can't talk cloud without having a relationship with application developers. So I think the next step as Nutanix matures these offerings on their cloud offerings is that they have to start to have a deeper relationship. They have to go side by side with their IT sponsors and organizations to start to have conversations with application developers. Yeah, and I love the online, the Clouderati, if you will, out there. Well, we understand this is the architecture of the future. Where it should goes, I love hanging out with the cloud native crew. But for me, it goes back to talking to their customers. And when the customers, if they're like, here's what we've done, here's the proof as to how I get faster time to market, how I'm accelerating my development teams inside, I'm creating one of the interviews we did. IT as business is how we run things. These are real digital transformation stories, impressive stuff and it's cloud. And it's not virtualization with a little layer on top. It's real change inside customers. And Nutanix, I'll say, as a platform to help us get from where I've been to where I'm going. Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Nutanix's customers are not listening to the Clouderati. They absolutely love the platform. I have, you know, I don't think I've run into a negative customer at the show. I haven't run into a customer that says, you know what, Nutanix isn't meeting my need in X or Y area. Home Depot won the innovation award at the show. Then Home Depot, is it a fourth thinking customer, truly embracing parts of the platform? I'm sure there's some cloud native pieces. There are a big Google Cloud platform customer. Want one of Pivotal's, you know, big ones on GCP. So, absolutely. And we have, I've talked to a number of customers, big on Amazon, developer shops, absolutely public cloud to piece of it. Yeah, if the criticism I should have, I always look and say, if I said public cloud and private cloud, where's your center of gravity? Right. Nutanix is going to go, leaning a little bit more towards, you know, the data center's hosted service provider. That's where they live today. But they're not blind to it. They're embracing it. They have full SaaS product. They're going to be expanding that. They are software at their core, distributed architectures where they're going. You know, it's through one of our favorite comments is that company X likes to move, moves at the pace of the CIO. I think it's safe to say, Nutanix is a little bit faster than the CIO. And they're enabling the old stuff. You know what, let's make that push button easy. And as we're looking, have an eye to the future and looking at the new stuff, let's see how we can get there, push button easy. There's a lot of work to do, but I think they're making some really interesting and probably the right moves for their customer base. All right, well, Keith, first of all, I want to thank you for all of your help here this week. The CTO advisor, always great to dig in with customers, really get in. It's been exciting to watch you kind of get to know a little bit more about this. I've had the pleasure of tracking Nutanix since the really early days been at every one of these shows. It is a great community, kudos to Nutanix. Thank you for sponsoring us. And if you're not familiar, if you look at the bottom of the videos we're playing right now, we mentioned who sponsors, we're trying to be as transparent. Keith and I though, we're out here in the field. If you have questions for us or you know, want us to ask something or question what we're doing, hit us up. We're really easy to reach on Twitter. Always happy for feedback from the community. And as always, check out at thecube.net for all the upcoming shows everywhere we're going. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching the Cube's presentation from Nutanix.next 2018 in New Orleans and see you at lots more shows.