 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier. And we are here live with Sunil Palti, who's the chief product and development of Nutanix and Pujon Kumar, who's the co-founder and CEO of Pernex Data, now part of Nutanix. Congratulations, Nutanix, purchased your company. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you, John. Good to see you guys again. Keep alumni, both of you. So give us a scoop. Give us the news. You guys were acquired. What's the story? So, yeah, it's been around four and a half, five years since we started the company. And both these companies have been very complimentary in what they did. Software companies, one selling an appliance, one selling pure software. And so we figured that we'll align in both the missions together and really be part of something that's a big movement in re-platforming the data center. Sunil, what's the motivation behind the purchase? Obviously from a product standpoint, is it filled with white spaces as strategic? Obviously customers and the product. Give us some color on the acquisition. Why? How does it impact the platform for Nutanix? I'm happy to do so. I'm happy to do so. So I think if you look at Nutanix's ambition about what we unveiled at Dotnex about the enterprise cloud, rather than just focus on the convergence of storage, compute, virtualization, what we think is something that we pioneered in our first act for the last five years, our next act is about convergence of public and private clouds. And essentially it's the convergence of the consumption model and the delivery model, whether it's CAPEX or OPEX, essentially the right cloud for the right workload. And so for that, the heart of it are two things in our opinion as we build towards that. The first thing is to ensure that one can understand the right workload characteristics so that we can then determine the right infrastructure to deliver it. And to do that, you essentially need a transparent but a thoughtful way to analyze the workload working set, for example, and then prescribe the right architecture for deploying that workload. And so that was the first requirement. The second requirement is once you get that idea, the next step is to actually seamlessly and transparently migrate that workload from wherever it is today to the new architecture, whether the new architecture is from a traditional 3-tier to a traditional, you know, the next generation hyperconversion infrastructure or to a public cloud of your choice, right? So that if a workload is an elastic workload, then it makes sense to deliver it as an OPEX, as a public cloud architecture. If it's a predictable workload, it probably makes sense to actually use an architecture like Nutanix as on the web scale side. So the second thing is about enabling this transparent but seamless migration in one click. Think about it as a VMotion for the next error, right? So as they're underpinning for both those characteristics, which is to understand the characteristics of the workload so that you can then choose the right cloud for the right workload and then to enable that migration from your traditional infrastructure to that next generation infrastructure. Pernix data's technology is central to that particular capabilities. And, you know, our goal is to essentially leverage that capabilities overlaid into our portfolio to deliver that convergence of public and private class. All right, so, Sunil, maybe let's just step back for a second. Give us a little bit from kind of a Nutanix company update. You know, everybody knows you filed the S1, waiting to an IPO, but you just acquired two companies. You've taken a little bit of a loan there. So, you know, when's the IPO happening? Why two acquisitions at this point? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think there's a multitude of questions there. Let me just break that down. I think on the product slash market strategy, you know, the way we look at this is a three dimensional sort of view, which is one dimension is on the product feature side about elevating it from, you know, hyperconversions to include virtualization to include this convergence of clouds. And that's where the acquisitions fit in, both Pernix data and com.io. The other dimension is about delivering the capability on a multitude of platforms. So one of the new things that we announced recently is to extend beyond the Nutanix, NX family and the Dell and Lenovo families to also have Nutanix run on Cisco UCS. And a lot of that was actually because of customer demand from our joint customers asking for it. You know, we did a great launch at the Cisco sales conference with Weitzberg adoption between their sales team and the partners. And the last dimension is about the go-to market, which is about expanding beyond enterprise into service providers, the Robo segment, the SMB segment. And as we scale the company from when we talked about, you know, the enterprise cloud vision. You know, the IPO obviously is a chapter in the next step of our journey. We can't speak in too many details about it. The way we look at the evolution of the company going forward is we have a real opportunity now armed with some technologies, complimenting our core foundational capabilities to essentially increase the value proposition that we offer to our existing customers while enabling new customers to more seamlessly migrate from their traditional architecture to Nutanix. So, Sonia, I want to follow up. You mentioned this, the Cisco support. So, Nutanix has done the testing. Customers have been asking. I know you've got large Cisco channel partner that's supportive of this too. But I want you to comment because I look at Cisco's reaction and it reminds me a little bit about the Nutanix-VMware relationship. There's a little bit of friction. There's a little bit of, you know, tug back and forth. I mean, both, you know, Cisco and VMware sound like they're important for you from standpoint, but the engagement's not as clean as, you know, some might think. Yeah, I think, you know, the Cisco, I think the potential partnership there is a little, in my opinion, more of a fertile grounded adoption right now because I think there's genuinely a one plus one equals three value proposition there. I think in the initial stages, obviously, between Cisco's own portfolio of products versus, say, Nutanix products, there'll be some friction. But I think, look, at the end of the day, as large companies expand and emerging companies expand, there will be areas of conflict and areas of overlap. And our goal is to focus on the areas of overlap. And in the case of Cisco's particularly, you know, it started off with like a four or five flagship customers of Cisco asking us to do this. In fact, that's how Cisco allowed us to actually validate and test some of the stuff with many of the engineering folks actually supporting this effort. I think, you know, the feedback that we've seen with our joint channel partners, in fact, Cisco's largest channel partners are all over the solution. So our expectation is, look, in the next three to six months, let the market decide. And I'm sure that I think, you know, as partners looking at it long term, we'll come together. All right, so Pujon, you know, you've got a really interesting background. You've spent some time at Oracle. You've been at VMware. You did a startup and now, you know, Nutanix is trying to become a new platform in kind of the changing ecosystem. Give us your viewpoint with kind of, you know, looking back as to where we are, what's important to the users, you know, what, I guess did things change from when you started Pernex data and kind of the opportunity that brought you to Nutanix. Yeah, a lot of questions there. So I think I'll start off with, I think, you know, these two companies coming together and the goal would be to take that one plus one equal to three mindset. And Nutanix has this thing where even though they've been very successful in what they've done so far, you know, the ambition is big. And so when the ambition is that big, it's really about now, you know, getting all this, you know, inorganic, so to speak, forces within the company and really getting that founder's mentality, so to speak, back when, you know, when Dheeraj and other folks had started the company. And that's really what I'm excited about, which is, you know, how can we take the company from where it is and take it to the journey at 10x the size? And that will only happen if we can really execute on some of these visions that, you know, Sunil talked about, where we can just build that, you know, one click, you know, we motion of the next decade, where we can blur the lines between, you know, the private and public clouds and really deliver on the Nutanix Enterprise cloud vision. And those are the things that really excite me and some of the technologies that we have built are really going to, you know, be the fundamental building blocks behind delivering those visions. Okay, so it sounds like it's, can you unpack a little bit how some of those products fit in? Because I've heard some people say, is this in AquaHire? You guys have some great storage kernel expertise in the company, which will definitely help for kind of future development, but you know, what is kind of, you know, the important stuff for today and down the road and maybe you answer and Sunil can follow up. Yeah, so I'll take a stab at it. Basically, obviously, you know, since this has been in the news for a long time, but really, you know, it got done last week, right? It's also not completely closed yet. So it happens the next two weeks. So some of these things obviously we are figuring out, but bottom line, what I'll tell you is, don't only look at what is visible, you know, out there. Sure, we have the analytics product, which is really relevant for the non-HCI environments, and we had the performance product, so to speak, the FPP product, but really, you know, if you double click into it, there is a lot of capabilities that the company has built and those are the capabilities that are going to become the fundamental building blocks for the future that we're going to build together. So I'll leave it at that for now. I think, and I think just to add on to what Pujin said, the way we look at this is, I think there are some tactical opportunities always in helping accelerate traditional three tier architectures. Our focus isn't about that. Our focus is, if anything, to focus on, you know, we fundamentally think that workload inertia in terms of migration to the new architecture is about data. And if you can unlock workloads with the way to seamlessly unlock the data inertia portion, which is where a bunch of the technology from Pernix combined with our technology coming to bear, I think that's where our forces will be aligned to, is to really enable that workload mobility across old to new web scale architectures or old to net new public cloud architectures. So one of the things that Pat Gelsen was talking about as Kino here at VMworld is obviously inter-clouding or, you know, cross-cloud, actually what we call inter-clouding, but multiple clouds, as customers look to the future, they've always been focused on performance in the data center. You guys have done an amazing job there, simplifying everything, but performance in the cloud is a really big deal. Can you guys share your thoughts on that because that's kind of a working area for operators right now. We're in the ops side saying, okay, if we have, say, a multiple clouds, they have to decide architecture. They got to think about things like, okay, I might have a workload here or there, performance hits might be on the horizon, they're nervous, there's some fud out there. The thoughts on there, relative to cloud in general and performance, is it an issue or not? Yeah, I mean, look, I think you could, for everybody that complains about security, for example, over the last five years with cloud, you know, Amazon has shown that, you know, there's so many other secure apps that are running widely on it. I think, look, I think security just and performance are mostly temporal issues in my opinion over the next five, 10 years, right? Sure, are there going to be issues around performance for running Oracle Rack-like environments on an AWS environment? Sure, probably, but I think the, if anything, the higher order bit is about the texture of the workload, mapping to the cost and the financial economics while keeping the simplicity and the elasticity of just ability to start quickly, start small and then pay as you grow, right? And so the way we look at this is frankly that there are some workloads that performance-wise today may not be a right click for the public cloud, but from an economics, from an agility side, they are. Trade-off, basically. Yeah, and so it may be better for them to move internally to a high-performance architecture, but with a set of APIs that over a period of time they can elastically move into the public cloud because that's the ideal way to actually leverage that particular high-performance workload or what it's elasticity from a consumption model that's OPEX versus sticking to a traditional CAPEX plus OPEX. So performance is a situational issue for them relative to how they deploy or architect, not so much a pure hit for some. I think security and performance, if anything, are, like I said, temporary stumbling blocks. So maybe whatever even Nutanix does initially, taking a workload and landing on a Nutanix on premise to solve for performance issues is actually still the first step. The second step is actually to free the workload to say, look, if this is a truly elastic workload and I need to spin up 1,000 machines for 10 hours, then the right answer for that is to actually use the compute cycles from a public cloud, right? So. What are the top three conversations you guys are having with customers? You know, obviously you have your business, you're getting under the hood if you will, making things run great, but relative to kind of this economic and the trade-offs that go on is all these conversations that need to be happened. How would you boil them up in terms of top three customer conversations around this kind of multi-architectural or multi-environment situation? It's a pretty broad question. I would say, let me just, I don't know if I have three things, but let me just tell you the, you know, whatever number that we run into, which is, the first thing is about, I think IT, as in the VP of IT and the CTO, or CIO, are figuring out what is their role in the next five years. In terms of like when they convert to their business, they have a top-line driver and a bottom-line driver, pretty much every CIO, right? So what they're looking for is a strategy that will help them in both dimensions, not just in one of them. And so, in the bottom-line dimension, clearly there's a whole bunch of ROI, TCO around leveraging net new architectures, but also, if you can provide an ability for them to handle or at least get closer to their business counterparts in terms of delivering applications so that they can forego the mundaneness of traditional IT operations. To me, the way I summarize it is, every CIO should become a CEO, a chief Amazon officer, right? In that sense, whether it's a logical Amazon or a physical Amazon. I think if they put themselves in that mode of thinking, I think the choices that they're going to make in terms of vendors, in terms of architectures, in terms of apps, will automatically have a true north in which they have to orient themselves for the top-line and the bottom-line. I don't know, Pujan, if you had anything to add to it. Yeah, I think it really comes down to, and that's where I love the Nutanix vision around the invisible infrastructure, to your performance question, the understanding workloads, multi-tenant environment, what should I run in my private cloud? What should I run in my public cloud? Those are the kind of things that you don't need to make it invisible for the end-user. And that's the journey that we need to take the cut. That's a goal, that's a great goal. It should be invisible. Exactly, right. And so that's really, I think, combining all of these things and really working on that, if you can do that, that's where you kind of free the CIA or the VP of technology from the mundane task so that they can really focus on what's really valuable for the business. Yeah, the apps themselves. Exactly. And how does it impact personnel? Thoughts on this, we always talk about autonomous cars. Oh, jobs going to get automated away with AI and machine learning. But in IT, that is also a shift that's happening. The personnel roles are changing, thoughts. Look, I think as we embark on replatforming the data center or replatforming the enterprise, I think inevitably most of IT have to replatform themselves, right? I mean, I was just at the conference just looking at some sessions and there were a couple of customers at the background and the session that they picked was about, oh, how do I use PowerCLI and PowerShell, right? So for example, as a classic administrator, coveting development, coveting programming, right? So I think it's already obvious that most of our customers are trying to move up the stack themselves in terms of both scope as well as abilities. So I think that is how... Operationally, too. I mean, that's really where they're digging in. So I think that wave is already happening about in terms of rather than focus on operating the infrastructure, focus on programming it and delivering it. And frankly, it's an interesting value proposition for many of the traditional admins to actually move up the stack, right? Is there anything that you guys could share in terms of customers around what's hot out there that people may or may not be looking at? I mean, it's always a fear of missing a trend. There's a lot of stuff going on in IoT. The IT guys are under a lot of pressure to move up the stack. I totally agree. Invisible infrastructure dev ops and or cloud ops as it evolves. Is there things going on that you see from a trend standpoint that are like, hey, don't miss out on that? I'll talk about one thing that we're seeing and sort of orienting ourselves a little bit. And then Pujon, you can comment as well. So look, I think this whole concept of multi-clouds and all that stuff, I mean, we have to also be aware that we could be boiling the ocean with this. Yet another variant of spread to thin, not really diving into it. So for example, as you help really transform an enterprise infrastructure, just keep it simple into an Amazon-like experience for just a set of workloads, even providing an adjacent service without actually providing all the cloud services, if you just provide a DR with one click, but do it really well and do it with simple one-click delight. So someone could actually say, look, I actually just tested DR with one click in the middle of a day. People just don't do that today, right? So I think a couple of things. They're taking on too much in IT. You're saying if it's too thin, you're boiling over the ocean. And I think on a fabric, which is what we are calling web scale, you have to be focused in terms of building these killer apps, right? And they have to come one at a time because these are complicated, deep apps that you have to do the right job on. But I think that is, so I would say that is like one dimension of our viewpoint. The other dimension of our viewpoint is frankly, as we look at this full gamut of applications, I think there is going to be a trend that we will see in the next five years, which is look, Amazon slash Azure's value add, in addition to providing the IS landscape is a bunch of services on top to help re-architect the application. But most of the apps moving to public cloud from our perspective are what we call lift and shift. And after a certain period of time, they will be re-architected in addition to some new apps, right? I think there's an equal opportunity for enterprise apps when they lift and shift to an on-premises version of an Amazon to also be re-architected with a similar set of Amazon-like services, right? So you will see us, I think in general, I think people will ask for services on top of IS on the enterprise side to also come in as part of re-platforming that application. So Poojaan, I want to give you the final word. We always love to talk to kind of the entrepreneurs, your co-founder in the valley. We talk about softwares in the world. So what lessons learns do you have? I mean, I remember meeting, you said it was three people and a dog around the corner from Nutanix's headquarters kind of grew it and now joining Nutanix. So what lessons would you like to share with the audience? Yeah, so I think for us fundamentally, we were a bunch of insurgents, right? We built this platform, we got it to almost close to 1,000 customers and we want the distribution scale that Nutanix now brings to get it in front of a lot more people. But really that mindset with which we started the company is the same mindset I'm coming into Nutanix with. Because when I built Exadata for Oracle, at that time Oracle was making $10 billion on database. But that didn't stop us from building a yet another multi-billion dollar initiative within the company. And that's the mindset that at least I am mentally bringing in into Nutanix so that we can basically go from here to the next site. So culture fit is a huge issue. It's a huge thing for us. Ambition and culture fit was the biggest reason technology aside, everything aside. Ambition and culture fit was a big reason for us to come together. And so how much did you guys sell the company for? Can you tell us? I'm just close, I'm just, I always try to get some data on theCUBE. This one is good looks. Billions, he's got a boat now, a Ferrari, driving now one on one. No congratulations, great to see you guys. Have a great exit and I got a great team in Nutanix. Nutanix congratulations on success and tell D Raj we said hello. Yeah we will. Okay this is theCUBE live here with Nutanix here on the side of theCUBE VMworld 2016. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back with more. Thank you for watching theCUBE.