 from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering dotnext conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the Nutanix dotnext conference in lovely Nice, France. We're inside the Acropolis Conference Center and happy to have me wrap up the show coverage as Adrian Bridgewater, who is a freelance contributor with publications such as Forbes and Computer Weekly. Adrian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Stu, thanks for having me on the show. All right, so Nutanix keeps calm inside the Cloud Tornado. I mean, you know, I love a little bit cheeky, but Nutanix Calm, of course, is their product there, but a lot going on, a lot of churn in the industry. It's the headline that you put on Forbes from the show here. Yes, thanks for your reading. Yeah. So how's the show been for you? It's been good. I mean, the company's gone from strength to strength. We all know that. It's been a really sort of slick operation. You know, we come to a lot of these events and you expect some tangible news and some opportunity to actually meet with the C-suite guys, and we've had that. So it's, you know, no complaints overall. It's been a good event. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely approachable. The Nutanix team does well with the press and the analysts to kind of pull us in, let us understand, because a lot of this area, I tell you, like hyper-converged infrastructure was not something that was readily accessible that most people knew. So they know they have to do some work and even kind of enterprise cloud that they push out there. A lot of it, their messaging's a little ahead of where most of the market is. What's your experience been with them? Well, I think, as I was kind of trying to say beforehand, DuRage and team have taken a really very hands-on approach with the press. He came with, you know, two or three of them and came over to London good four or five years ago. Was it five years ago or four years ago? And kind of went around the table saying, does anybody, who knows Nutanix? And there was about 10 press who did come out for that lunch. And there were a lot of kind of like, you know, fumbling, shuffled looks and, you know, he really didn't get a clear idea. I think people know Nutanix now. They have an idea of hyper-convergence. They, people are almost, you know, trying to understand what an abstraction layer is and what the company's taking to market. So, yeah, I think he's kind of democratizing or the team are democratizing their actual technology proposition. I think people are, you know, really starting to understand where they sit in the cloud market. Yeah, and I'm curious, you know, when you talk to customers, when you look at kind of your readership there, it feels like, by the time now, people understand Nutanix and they might have gotten their arms around hyper-converged there, they're off to the next thing. And they're talking about multi-cloud and they talked about edge computing some today and some of the future technologies. Do they get ahead of themselves in the marketing too much or are they doing a good job of kind of giving a full vision thought leadership? I think, always they're difficult to be, difficulty within internally in Nutanix is that they really understand the cloud model and so whether they've got ahead of themselves, I'm not sure, the customers are only really getting to the verge of going cloud native with a lot of their applications and that's one of the things I've been looking at a lot recently. So it's kind of like, if that's the point that companies are at on the hype cycle, then it's kind of what do they need to do to get that happening in their organizations? And it's probably now the point where they're starting to ask, well, at what point would we use Nutanix in a total implementation? So it's, I don't think they're ahead of themselves. I think they're obviously of the time and of the place because we're all focusing on them and people are starting to understand what cloud computing means. Yeah, absolutely. And something we've seen at Wikibon from our research standpoint is there's still a large legacy base out there and how much of that is going to convert into what we've been trying to call for years, private cloud. We put out some definitions about two years ago and said true private cloud because just virtualizing isn't enough, a little bit of orchestration isn't enough. But there is in that multi-cloud world, Nutanix is going to say we're not just for the data center in that piece, we're going to play and reach out to some of the public cloud, we're going to live in this world. So yeah. Isn't there, I think there's almost a confusion between what is private cloud and what is public cloud? And because we're almost getting vendors selling public cloud as private cloud, I really don't think anyone's got their head around what the industry's trying to do with it. So what we say is the public cloud really should be the benchmark that you go against. I want the operational experience of the public cloud. That being said, nobody's keeping up with Amazon. Three features a day, they're massive scale. Yeah, Microsoft and Google, I'm not discounting them. Even Alibaba's there, some others like Oracle and IBM have public cloud services, but you're never going to have the amount of services and access to that in the private cloud. But that's not necessarily what I need to, but I need to be able to respond to the business agility is the thing that they have. I need to be able to, what Nutanix has delivered really well is, I can start small and I can expand in incremental pieces as opposed to kind of the monolithic infrastructure that we used to spend 18 months building. So that's kind of where we say. Don't you think it's the services elements that are falling into the toolkits that we're seeing Nutanix develop? Most of the announcements at the show have been related to incremental service elements. So it's kind of, what do I, I've got my cloud computing infrastructure, I'm starting to build cloud native applications within the business. What's my DevOps offering like? What's my infrastructure management to, things, the prism user management in this space, all of the sort of elements in that, everything's starting to just get more finessed and more sophisticated. Spot on, Adrienne, absolutely. As calm is really going to be that platform that's going to allow them to deliver those services to where the customers need it. And even the naming of this, it's like, oh, they're object service. Oh, look at it, it's OSS. Oh, the compute thing, it's AC2. You know, sounds very AWS-like and how they name things as opposed to, you think AHV reminded me a little bit more of following the VMware type of model. So absolutely, you know, Amazon, a bar that many companies and industries are following if Nutanix wants to become an iconic software company. I'd love your commentary on that. You know, looking after Amazon and what they're doing is not a bad model to follow. Yeah. No, I think it's interesting to look at where they've come from in terms of what they used to describe themselves as, which was the hyperconvergence company. And they're not that now. They're the enterprise cloud company. And I think we all, I think it was the Vienna conference. So it was the European leg, which this is, this time of last year, that they changed the tagline. So you sort of walk into the convention center and suddenly, you know, why aren't you the hyperconvergence company now? So it was kind of that proposition that they were going to be a broader platform play, which is the whole one OS, one click, one cloud. That's how they're taking a bigger proposition to market now, don't you think? Absolutely, and the term I heard that I kind of latched onto that was that iconic software company. And all indications are they'll be 100% of software company relatively soon. That means that it's not, oh, well, I'll buy the super micro appliance from Nutanix. Well, how will that change the go to market? Sudeesh on the interview said, we're re-changing how we think our sales structure and everything like that because they've got their OEMs of course offer that full, fully integrated solutions. They're still going to do all the testing and make sure that everything goes out, but it will change a little bit. The revenue, I actually had the Chief Revenue Officer on and he talked about, he's like, hey, software's got pretty good margins, right? And it's like, yeah, well, okay. So margins will go up as a percentage standpoint, but overall revenue as a public company will see how they thread that needle. I think they've got a nice window here because they just restated all of their software revenue that they had had from their OEMs. They used to take it kind of over, I believe a three year chunk and now they're putting it there. So they've got this opportunity to hit right around a billion dollars, change themselves and truly be a software company and consider it a software company and measure it a software company by Wall Street. Is that something that you think outside of the Wall Street people and the impacts on the channel and sales? I think it was surprising to have to hear the guys try and justify themselves as a software company. I mean, because I think that's what we've perceived them to be anyway. And then of course every business is a software, every company is a software company. Even a bakery from literally every industry vertical or every firm, every customer is having to redefine itself as a software company. So I don't think it was, I don't think, I just, even for Dirage to say that cloud is digital, I think we assumed so much of that and I don't know why, they're kind of going back to basics with some of this stuff, which is, but that's fine. I think there's a lot of clarification that needs to be done to explain what these technologies are supposed to mean to customers. All right, Adrian, meetings, you talked to executives, probably got some sessions, maybe talked to some customers. Key takeaways that you had from the show, any new things you learned that you didn't know coming in? I really, my key takeaway is as the toolkit has expanded, and the question I think I posed to Siddish was what are you going to add next? And there was no sort of defined component. It seems to be quite a complete go-to-market proposition, so I think that their total house, their shop is looking fairly complete, so it's validated, I think. That's their market proposition. It's not a term they use, but I think that they've got the credibility and the validation for what they're trying to get a market with. Yeah, so it seems Nutanix known a little bit more in Europe now, how they do an overall in your opinion? In terms of their recognition amongst the customer base. I think they're on the up and up, aren't they? They're getting the recognition amongst the press. They're certainly, the customers here seem very happy. They're getting, they've got the blue-chip clients that they want to use as use cases. So yeah, across Europe, it's good that they're moving locations for this conference. We were in Vienna, we're now in France. I'm not sure where next year is. They're making the spread and their footprint substantial. Yeah, any favorite spot for a sub-5,000 person event? For next year? Yeah. Italy, I think, yeah. Something like Milano? Yeah, but yeah, some were warmer south, I think. All right, well, yeah, I've heard they're actually not announcing the location this week. They have narrowed it down. They're definitely committed to doing the European show, but definitely look forward to seeing where they go from here. Adrian, want to give you the last words? Any final things? What are you working on outside of Nutanix? Things that your audience and readership are mostly interested in? I think what I'm generally working on is day-to-day reporting on my beat as a journalist. There's always been, well, three words, really, software application development. But a lot of the time I'm writing for people that aren't actually developers. So it's kind of just explaining what the mechanics of software operations, what they are, what these things do, because 10 years ago, people didn't know what an app was, but the iPad arrived and we've started to understand so much more of what goes on inside the machines we're using. So I'm just trying to explain what the developers are using and how that's actually impacting the way the consumers use every day. That's what I do. All right, well, Adrian Bridgewater, appreciate you taking some of your words and bringing them out to the video for our audience here and appreciate you helping me wrap up. Two days of coverage, wall-to-wall. Heck, they're tearing this place down and we were still going strong here. So thank you so much. I'm Stu Miniman for the whole team here at SiliconANGLE and beyond. Appreciate you joining us. Be sure to check out all of our coverage, siliconangle.com for the written word, thecube.net for the videos, wikibon.com for the research. Wrapping up, final word, Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.