 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix Dot Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. So I'm just going to hear you, I'm not hearing from you. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dot Next here at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are welcoming to theCUBE George Knuck. He is the vice president, worldwide sales and channels at Zenos. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, excited to be here. So here we are on the convention floor, 6,500 attendees, you actually have a booth here. Yes, we do. It's actually right over there. If you take a look, orange logo. Very handsome logo. So tell, for our viewers who are not familiar with your company, tell your Austin, Texas based. We are. Tell our viewers a little bit about what you do, what Zenos is about. Sure, so we help IT professionals do something really important. Ultimately solving a big problem for them, which is keeping customers happy. So we're looking at, we provide a software platform that looks at all of the underlying infrastructure that's actually supporting the application itself. So they're trying to deliver apps and services to their customers, a happy customer, someone who clicks their phone or their laptop and just gets to that service. We make sure that that app is available and healthy by looking at everything underneath it, whether that's a hybrid cloud, it's a private HCI type cloud as well, or it's microservices or it's legacy infrastructure. It doesn't matter. We talk to it and we help make sure that everything's working properly. That it works the way it's supposed to. Exactly. We had the Chief Product Officer on Sunil from Nutanix talking about hyperconverges, the benefits of that. And they also talked about hyperconverged clouds, I guess with a lack of a better description, that that world's going there too. When you start to get into this resetting of the infrastructure elements on-premises and also in hybrid and multi-cloud, a lot of problems arise. They do. This is a huge issue. Can you give us some color commentary on your thoughts on where customers are here? Some are like, well, we're not there yet. Some are running out of gas or stuck in the mud. And some just saying, we're all in on the cloud. So different profile makeups of cloud adoption. Yep, well, let me talk about it a little bit. So I heard a stat recently that the current adoption of enterprises for clouds about 10%. So 10% of the workloads today in the cloud doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of growth and a lot of people aren't trying it, but only 10% are there. And in a lot of cases, the more progressive organizations actually did move workloads of the cloud. They got there, they found out that maybe things were more expensive than they thought or didn't quite perform well. And they took a step back and retooled it. It really was for Nutanix, I think, personally, a very good time for them to step in with this notion of a private cloud. It's sort of that step in between for some of them. However, when you look at it from our perspective, we've been around since 2005. We started as open sourced and moved into a commercialized product. We've worked with some of the biggest banks, insurance companies, telcos, and even MSPs in the world. We've seen that the certain workloads have moved to the cloud pretty quickly or to hyper-converged. But yet there's still a lot that hasn't and there's a lot of unknowns that are there. And in some cases it's a function of is the team ready to make the move? In other cases is the culture of the IT organization ready to make the move. For us, it doesn't matter because we can look at all of it but we can make it easier for them because we actually help them look at the various workloads and the performance of those apps and how they would perform when they make a move to the future. I want to get your thoughts on the psychology of the environment, the buyer or the app user. Whenever there's a change over to new technology or a new desktop or new cloud, the expectation is it better run better. So it's going to be run faster and it better be a better user experience. So this kind of puts you guys on the pressure cooker because you guys have to monitor. Make sure it's working. Yeah, make sure it's not worse off than it was before. Yeah, so table stakes now is be better, be faster, whether it's a VDI rollout or cloud implementation. How do you guys handle that? We know there's a piece that actually happens before that. So the first step that we see that happens for organizations making the move is actually rationalizing the views of the truth, if that makes sense. And so in a lot of organizations there are different silos. I've been in meetings where the DevOps team, the ITSM team running ServiceNow, for example, and the ITOps are meeting each other, shaking hands and saying, hi Jane, hi Bob, great to meet you for the first time. And those meetings are being held by what I'll say are more progressive leaders, the CIOs and VPs. But the first thing that happens is every group says, well I have this basket of tools that I'm using to make sure that my customers are happy. And they have to rationalize all that. One of our customers, Huntington Bank, had 37 tools in place to look at every single part of the business and get that one view. And you can imagine it's pretty difficult. We helped them make that transition. If they're culturally going to make the switch, then having a grip on what's working now will help them replicate that when they make the move to a private cloud or public cloud, if that makes sense. Yeah, it totally does. And also you mentioned the status quo. A lot of companies don't want to rock the boat. Yes, when they bring in new technologies. How do you see that playing out? Because one of Nutanix's advantages is that when they get in, they have to change agents and cause some benefits there for the customer and then they grow from there. But yeah, some people still going to buy the old stuff. Yeah, well so you know what's interesting? So we have a change agent who's a friend of ours at Nutanix, a customer. So Wendy Pfeiffer, the CIO of Nutanix is actually a customer of ours. They call themselves Customer Zero. If you've read her interviews, they drink their own champagne. And she, recently we interviewed her and she talked about that change. And I believe it does need to come from the top down. So progressive leaders will introduce that change of the business and honestly make it comfortable for their team to take risks. Cause it is a risk making a move to any of these technologies. I think when you, when we look at the, I guess the simplest migration for a customer to HCI or private cloud, it is going to be maintaining that visibility across the legacy into the new world that's going to be critical for them. That view by the way is one that even the CIO wants and the CEO. I want to talk about the changing role of the CIO because it is a very big theme and trend in this industry. And you keep talking about this idea of a progressive CIO and this is someone who is willing to take risks, willing to tear down silos, make sure people are collaborating. Can you talk a little bit more about what you see as the people who are best at their jobs? Yes. The best CIOs out there and what they're doing, what they're doing differently. Right. Well, so I mentioned these groups meet for the first time, the IT ops, the DevOps and ITSM and there's probably other groups that come into those rooms as well. The profile today of a lot of the CIOs and it's a fine one is someone who came up through the operations organization more than likely and they understand how that world works. They've had to, for some of them, it's been an easy transition to bring the DevOps folks into the room. Think about this, right? IT ops role is in the past, bring me an app, I'll make sure it runs flawlessly on this amazing gear that I have. The DevOps role is I'm going to take an app, I'm going to run it on this gear and I'm going to optimize the app. So it's a different view to get to the same problem on the other end. And so I would tell you that it is about being progressive and that role has shifted. It's very possible the next batch of CIOs will come out of the developer organization. One more quick comment on that. So there's a pretty provocative forester wave that came out a few weeks ago that we're in who for the first time didn't look at the type of tech. They actually looked at the problem being solved and the problem as they categorize it is intelligent application and service monitoring. So it is about services and apps running well and there are more than one technology to solve that problem. We're pleased to have been recognized for our thought leadership in that space. How do you guys handle the potential blind spots in the observation space that you guys have to look under the covers and look at everything? How do you guys identify potential blind spots? What's, do you guys filter it out? Take us through an example. Sure. Well so a couple of things that will help you get to the blind spots. So there are a lot of blind spots especially when you have multiple tools there's blind spots. The second part of that that's pretty relevant is getting complete visibility to all the right folks in the organization. So one of the first things we do is look at that entire surface of fuel that entire landscape, lay it all out and start at the top with the service and show all the dependencies of everything underneath it. We call that the model. So when the model's in place then we can show the impact of change on the model. That could be a bad piece of gear it could be a bad piece of code it doesn't really matter to us we're looking at it that way. That's probably the first step in it. The second piece that goes along with this is something we did intentionally which is we brought AI into the mix. So we partnered with Google we actually pivoted much like Nutanix did a number of years ago. Last year released Ceno's cloud and brought in the AI and ML capabilities of Google primarily because the amount of information coming out of all these complex infrastructures is more than a human could handle. So we are using that AI to help look at each anomaly each problem as it happens each potential blind spot and uncover that using the technology to determine is it a real problem for me or is it just noise? It's interesting you bring up the IT ops and DevOps thing you know one thing that Google proved out I've been saying this on theCUBE as you know for years and recently highlighted at the recent NEXT conference they nailed the whole SRE thing Site Reliability Engineer and they didn't do it as a strategy to try to get market share they did it because they had their own problem and that was massive scale, a lot of automation a lot of software but they had a development environment of devs and ops was about one human to many machines relationship that's essentially what you're getting at here. It is actually it's interesting you know Mike Dickerson from Google who published some of the interesting initial charts kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of SRE the foundational level actually is monitoring it's sort of like air or water or safety and having that visibility is the first piece the one thing I'll say to you though and you touched on automation the all that information in the world and all that AI is kind of worthless if you can't actually automate the back end of it so we spent a lot of time working with either cloud optimization you know AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Function or we're looking at things like Puppet and Chef just to automate all of that other end of it we have a term we use we call it software defined IT ops when you get to the point where the inputs more than a human can handle they won't be able to react fast enough a lot of our tools the humans are used this sounds like I'm talking about the Skynet but a lot of the tools the humans use are is actually in forensic analysis when a problem happens the remediation and the pro activities happening through the machine you know we're at Skynet when dogs start sniffing out malware walking at the machines you know exactly on a stack related question you know one of the things we heard from Sunil the chief product officer was the multi-cloud battle is going to be fought at the top of the stack or up the stack so the question is what line or what's the line for under the hood now so as you look at microservices and DevOps continues to go with Kubernetes and service measures you're going to have a series of services being turned on torn down all the time so the challenges are going to be on the monitoring and observation so where do you guys go how high up do you go is there a line where the hood is what's under the hood what's above can you take us through that that's a fantastic question I couldn't have asked for a better one so the one side of it is how's the app performing that's sort of above the hood if you will right and we are looking at that and we're looking at that all the way to the level of down to the experience of that application and how it runs on the infrastructure but we go all the way down to the bare metal as well because we think there's a value in doing it there's a couple concepts out there around serverless and by the way Xenos cloud is a serverless deployment so we actually eat our own dog for you drink our own champagne when it comes to this tech but that notion of below the hood for us is all the way down to the bare metal and that visibility if you want to look at it in another way is actually the great high quality data and raw material to drive the IEI and the output if it makes sense on the other end of it yeah I want to ask you about the show so how many of these have you been to and what's your experience what are you hoping to bring back with you to Austin that you learned at Nutanix but for Nutanix we've been a partner with Nutanix since we started working as a customer which would have been probably late 2016, 2016 when we started doing the shows last year we did we actually attend as a partner we attend some of their meetings and the partner part's important to come back to in a second but as a technology partner initially now we're moving into a point where we're trying to sell with the team and help them bring our visibility to their customers the last one we did was Next Europe which was a fantastic show in London last fall and we've also done a lot of the road shows in the cities the thing we love about it is we both talk to the same customer both have the same people we're talking to the one thing we're trying to do and I know that Nutanix is as well is we want to bring more of the developers and the DevOps crew into it we believe they need to be a part of the discussion so that's something we're trying to help facilitate but this show's been fantastic for us, yeah and to your point about the developers we're seeing that in the infrastructure world it's not just operation work there's devs in there now automating away these mundane repetitive tasks yeah, I think it's more friendly than it was for sure great, well we'll take your word for it thank you so much George for coming on theCUBE it was a pleasure having you on thank you, pleasure meeting you both thank you so much, take care I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier we will have so much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit