 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are theCUBE, we are the ESPN of tech. We have two tech athletes on with us today. We have Ashfin Ramesh, AVP Marketing and Alliances Technology Services at Cognizant. Welcome. And we have InderSidu, EVP Global Customer Success at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Inder. Thank you. So, why don't I start with you? How, for viewers who are not familiar with Cognizant, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you're all about? Sure. So Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies. We focus on transforming clients' business model, operating model, and technology model. NASDAQ listed 16 billion revenue last year. We are a Fortune 200 company. We work with about half of the Fortune 100 companies. And, you know, companies trust us to help transform the work that they're doing, so. And what, and so, those are tall orders. So, what are you hearing from customers right now? What are their biggest challenges that they're facing? So, I think, you know, customers are basically in two buckets as we see it, right? We see customers who are inherently excited about the challenges that they're facing, and there are other customers who are still grappling how to figure out the onslaught that's coming at them. And if I just abstract this beyond technology into the overall spectrum of how I look at it, it really transforms to what I call our customer set or not, right? And that translates to social, economic, and technology. So, there are a lot of social changes that are happening because of all the things that are going on. You know, how well our company's able to adapt to those social changes really makes a difference in their ability to engage with the consumer. There are a lot of economic changes, economic models that are being brought. How well are companies being able to adapt to those economic models? And then more importantly from where, you know, Nutanix and Cognizant sit, technology is playing a huge role, both on the social and the economic angle, and so how do companies leverage technology to be able to drive that change, right? And how well you do these three things really makes a difference in customers' lives. Talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's the relationship, obviously partner, you have customers, they got the software now and hardware before all coming together. What's the relationship, how you guys work together? It's fantastic. We've been a partner with Nutanix for more than three years. And, you know, I think the critical piece and foundational elements of the partnership with Nutanix more than the products that they bring out because they're constantly innovating all the time, I think is on a bedrock of transparency, flexibility and specificity, right? So there's a lot of transparency in terms of their roadmap and we get a sense of where they're headed. They get a sense of where we're headed and how we're focused and what our strategy is. That allows us to really lock in to what the customer is demanding. Second is flexibility with the elements that I talked about around social, economic and technology. It's very important for a flexible combination, right? Because I kind of look at this age of co-optition as a battle of ecosystems. So we are locked in with Nutanix in this battle of ecosystems, right? And so in my role, I build value chains and Nutanix is a critical partner in that value chain in being able to adopt to what the customers are demanding at us. And we're very specific about what we do in the marketplace, right? Because all of us have choices and it's very important to be specific to solving customer's issues, so. It's been a great partnership. It's interesting, we always talk on theCUBE around automation, DevOps has been a big driver with cloud, multi-cloud now. If you have all these value activities strung together in a value chain, no one company can own it all, right? So this is where, but automation requires end-to-end visibility. So the big trend we're seeing is who's going to enable that? Because I can imagine your environment, you could talk to the top customers, we do the queue, hundreds of events a year. The same theme comes back from over and over again on theCUBE. And it's like a refrain, it's the anthem of the customer, which is, look, I need to innovate my business model. I got to move quickly to a new operating model, cloud, because they all see that they taste the cloud and they want the cloud everywhere. And then they want to make sure they have a technology partner. So all three of those theaters are exploding in innovation. And they're all at the same time. This hasn't been a big challenge. So how do you guys work together to address the business model innovation, the operating model challenges, whether that's skill gaps training or whatever, and then obviously technology selection? So I think the most important thing is to be able to sense and engage, right? I think that's where it starts. If you've built a ecosystem of the value chain, in our case with Nutanix, in a way that we stay close to the consumer changes, we build a method of engagement that allows us to sense and engage better. I think that addresses a big part of what you talked about, right? Then it's about figuring out what elements of technology and being able to advise the customer in the right way in their journey to what they want to achieve in sort of introducing those technologies to the table. Inter, I want to bring you in here on this. You are the EVP of customer success at Nutanix. You have a lot of success. I mean, you have net promoter scores of 90, which is really unheard of in this industry. I think so many people out there watching this want to know what is your secret sauce? I mean, how do you get that? Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. I think the first and foremost is being extremely customer centric in everything that you do not as a function within the company, but across the company. Customer success isn't just a function, it's a philosophy, it's a cultural value, it's a mindset, it's everybody's job. You got to start there. Second, you hire people who have a great deal of empathy for the customer and a great deal of expertise in what the customer is looking for. So they bring empathy and they're deeply technical in terms of bringing that expertise and actually applying that towards the customer's problems. And then maybe the third thing I'd say is always being focused on the customer's outcomes as opposed to your own desire to either sell more services or more products or whatever, because if you're a customer, you're outcome centric, everything else follows from that. Keeping that as a North Star, I think has been the primary factor that's driven that. There's one other thing that I'd add to that and that is something I think John, you were referring to a little bit earlier which is this notion of automation. So in the past, people would drive customer success by throwing more and more bodies at the problem, more and more people at the problem. That's so yesterday, right? Now it's all about, you still need people. Absolutely, but you need to empower them with a great deal of data, with a great deal of insights, with a great deal of automation, do that in real time, be predictive, be proactive and so on. And so that last element, that secret sauce is pretty important. That's interesting. We had a session earlier on talked about the tech landscape. We talked out from cloud to politics and how technology without accountability and responsibility with people can be a bad outcome. I mean, you give the tools to the wrong people or if someone say government doesn't know what the technology can do, bad outcomes happen. Same with cloud selection. We start to get in some of these new areas where there's market shifts going on, where there's real lives on the line in terms of jobs, re-skilling, training. You guys are on the cusp of this next shift. And you're on the front lines, putting it all together as a global S.I. for all the top customers. So digital transformation, although it sounds very buzzwordy, is actually real in the sense that these are material changes to companies, how they're operating in their business model. So the impact's pretty high. So the role of people is super important. What's going on there? Is it, how's the progress in your view? Are customers ready? Are they getting trained up? Are their IQs moving faster? Are they more accountable? You know, one of the things, a couple of observations over there, I think I would say that in the last 90 days I've probably met a hundred customers. I don't think there's probably, with the exception of maybe a couple, I don't think there's been any conversation where talent hasn't come up, specifically the shortage of talent. So one of the things, which is why, by the way, it becomes hugely critical for us to have partners like Cognizant, with whom we have a fantastic relationship. They are so complimentary and so critically interwoven into our skill and their skill jointly. Every customer basically says, look, I used to have a virtualization admin, a security admin, a network admin, a database admin, this, this, that, and the other. And what you've done is you've hyper-converged not only technology, but you've hyper-converged the roles. Well, hyper-converging the roles mean you need one person instead of 10 people, but that one is a really hard one to find. So help me train them and work with your partners to bring that capability. So talent shortage, especially as you move away from the larger metropolitan areas, is a real issue. It's a real issue. And we're working towards that. We're trying to address that by making products simpler. As you know, that's been a hallmark of Nutanix's simplicity and support and service. Those have been our hallmarks. So making it simpler is very key, but no matter how simple you make it, you still need that element of human intelligence, human touch, and then automation. Those are the ways. And the risks too from the customers love to get the integration standpoint because, well, that's a lever for you guys. Get leverage out of that. When you take 10 to one or reduce down the roles, hyper-converge things, the outcome is pretty positive. You're enabling new things, but it allows for people to be redeployed as well, the existing roles. They're not really going away, they just get shifted. So yes, we need more people, need new people, but also the dynamic of fear is my job going away. So there's leverage and you get efficiencies and potentially redeployment capabilities. How is that affecting your job at Cognizant? So at Cognizant, people are extremely scored to the way we operate. So as I mentioned, we are a $16 billion organization, but we're almost 200,000 people, 185,000 just to be precise. So for us, the retraining and rescaling of people is ingrained in the way we've operated since our inception 25 years ago. And it's about two, three things. One is a basic understanding that while technology curves are exponential, the change management in people are linear. So that fundamental understanding of that shift is very important that we continue to invest into the training and change management of individuals to allow them to progress through the value curve as technology shifts happen, right? And for that, you need both a culture and a structure for that to happen, right? And because we've grown through this environment, we have Cognizant Academy and we have few other systems and processes and communication elements that we put in place that allow our employees to sort of grow as the technology shifts happen. That's one. Second piece is, I think, a very important reason why customers work with us is because we understand their industry. So we serve almost 20 industries, but almost 70 to 80% of our revenue comes from a few industries. And customers really engage and continue to work with us because of our deep understanding of their business, right? So it's this ability to be able to understand technology and the progress of technology from people, you know, from companies like Nutanix and then be able to stitch that appropriately to the business of the customer and put a structure in place that allows this shift to happen that allows us to grow. But going back to what Inder said earlier, so many of the skills that are necessary today, I mean, yes, of course, it's about keeping up with the shifts in technology, but so many of the reasons that Nutanix has been successful is that its employees are empathetic, that they listen, that they're paying attention, that they ask good follow-up questions. So are you, when you're talking about Cognizant Academy and the re-skilling, are you also helping them learn these important skills? No, I think I have a 10-year-old son, right? So as I think about what his future would look like, I definitely feel that the relevance of IQ as a race is reducing and empathy to the point that Inder made and your EQ is sort of far more important, right? And we live in this world where sort of the virtual world is almost taking over the physical world. We're on that cusp, right? Somewhere, I mean- You're talking John's language. You can take a guess on who's ahead and who's losing. So it becomes very important not only to build a sense of empathy in the real world, but also a sense of empathy in the virtual world, right? In the way you communicate with customers, in the way you listen to customers, how you listen to customers and engage. So that is a very critical component of how we train our employees so that we're continuously staying ahead in terms of even sensing and engaging with them. You know, one of the things that brings up in the conversation we had earlier with the customer, they love the efficiencies of how you guys can collapse with hyperconvergence, which you've done in the modern enterprise now and now going to the cloud, you know, hyperconverged clouds, we get that strategy. I think it's going to be bigger than you guys forecast, in my opinion. But what that really points to is a cultural shift. Yes. Okay, and the cultural shift is, okay, I had this before, all this legacy stuff. Then it's the question of, okay, how do I get people on the right tune here? How do I organize internally? So it's not so much a technology decision, it's more of a culture decision. And so I asked the CIO of a big consumer company who came in to transform this big conglomerate. You'd know their name if I said it. He said, when he walked in, the biggest problem that they had is they outsourced everything in the 90s to the point where in the 2000s they were so efficient. They had the storage admin, they had all these roles, and they were holding the gear down, they had perimeter-based security. They were perfect, but they had lost their competencies, their software. So as the world shifts to software, a lot of CIOs are being asked to essentially build software teams. So the new change over combined with the new efficiencies is they have to boot up development teams. Infrastructure all the way to the top of the stack. So that's challenging. So I know you guys do a lot of work there in this area at helping companies transform it. This is a huge challenge. How do you go from being lean and nimble operationally to having pure core competency in software development, automation, machine learning is not enough people to hire. So this seems to be a core challenge. Yeah, I think there's, if I had to look at the core challenge in terms of areas to focus, clearly people focus historically on infrastructure technologies. They need to focus on two additional areas. Let me elaborate what they are. One of them is absolutely the new move towards DevOps, containerization, those kinds of newer technologies that play not in the CIOs shop but in the development side of the house. And there's clearly a focus within Nutanix on the product side and on the people side to emphasize that. And we work with customers on that. The second thing is actually a little bit related to what Ashwin was saying. What we find when we engage with customers again and again if there's an issue, it turns out nine times out of 10 it's not because of a technology. It's either because there was an operational deficiency in their processes or there was an organizational lack of proficiency or it was something financial. So when I put customer success managers onto accounts the biggest thing that they do is they create a customer success plan that actually focuses number one on operational practices. Do you have run books? Do you have controls? Do you have automation? Do you have monitoring? Do you have call back information? Do you have all of that so that your processes are robust? It's entirely customer centric. It's independent of technology or only mildly related. That's one. Second, do you have the organizational skills, the capabilities that these people need to have? Can you get them sandboxes for training? Can you get them certified, et cetera, et cetera? Can you move them up? And then of course the last thing is financial which is can you look at it in a larger context not just of a technology decision but of a financial decision relative to total cost of ownership, return on the investment, cloud versus private, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And software seems to be the theme in all of this. Software absolutely, 100% in all of that. Software rules. Yeah, software rules. We're the software company now. Yes. That's right. Especially the cube. Inder, Ashwin, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure. Absolutely, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE.