 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a CUBE conversation at Silicon Angles Palo Alto Studio. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest and new to Nutanix, the chief marketing officer, Ben Gibson. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me here. I love the studio and love the chance to chat with you. All right, so our audience knows Nutanix really well, so let's introduce them to you first of all. Give our audience a little bit about your background and we know Nutanix, IPO not that long ago, exciting, growing real fast, so, you know, I'm sure it makes sense, but why for Ben? Yeah, for me, first and foremost, it's such an exciting company. We're going through a lot of really strong growth right now. We've really created a category in the space around hyperconvergence and now we're really expanding from that position. And to be in the middle of that, I think it's really exciting. So your background is mostly in the networking space and it's one of those things. I'm a networking guy by background. Network is changing a lot lately, but not nearly as fast as some of the other parts. So, you know, tell us a little bit about your background, where you've been, what your skill set's going to bring to Nutanix in that ecosystem. Yeah, you know, I did. Like you, I hailed from the networking industry. I spent a good portion of my career at Cisco. I spent part of my career at Aruba Networks, which is in the Wi-Fi wireless space. But I think you're right. I think the acceleration of innovation in Nutanix's industry, a lot of stuff has changed so quickly in that space and networking hasn't quite kept up with that level of change of things. And then for me, it's kind of getting on a much faster train and moving forward with it. All right, so we've had theCUBE at every single one of the dot-next conferences. Thank you. They're fun. Your predecessor, Howard Ting, had a certain flair. So, you know, let's talk a little bit about the show and you know, are there things you're going to be putting your stamp on at this show coming up in New Orleans? Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's great to succeed Howard in the role. I used to be advisor for the company. And so Howard and I used to have periodic pancake breakfast and I told him what I thought and he shared with me a lot about how exciting things were, what was happening at Nutanix and how they really move forward. And I knew about dot-next. I've seen dot-next. I know what an exciting show it is. For a company like Nutanix to draw this year over 5,000 attendees to this show, that's notable and what to me, that signals is the level of intensity and the level of loyalty that we enjoy in our customer base. They're believers and they're coming to the show to learn from us, to connect with each other and really to accelerate some of their plans on how they continue to innovate. Yeah, you know, we try to travel to so many different shows and absolutely. It is at its core, it's a user conference. It's users there wanting to learn how to use what they have even better, learn about the cool net and the technologies. Dave Vellante and I have talked about, Nutanix is up there with companies like ServiceNow that have just people that come and are just kind of fanatically supported. It reminds me of, while VMware is a great company, doing well today, many years ago, everybody had the, I love VMware bumper stickers. VMworld's a great show. We'll be there this year, and I know your company will too. So what do people, what brings them to that show from your standpoint and gives a little insight as to kind of some of the special things they'll be seeing this year in New Orleans. Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest attractions of coming to this show is if you think about the role of an infrastructure professional, someone who's looking at hybrid cloud environments and how do you manage those, thinking about what applications run on what cloud platform, there's a lot of change and fluidity to that. And I think the nature of the role of an IT or an infrastructure professional is changing. Server storage admin is quickly evolving because that's converging just like the technology has. And so for me, this show is about how do you get ahead of those trends? How do you position yourself to be as strategic as possible within your own organization? And that's the way I like to think of .next. It's a place that a professional can come to learn and to grow their career and their technology expertise. Yeah, it's a great point. One of the things I've loved on theCUBE is there are speakers that aren't just from the tech industry. So everyone from Deepak Mahaltra, who was from Harvard, thought leaders in the space too, on stage at one of the shows, it was David Blaine doing a magic trick while one of your engineers was configuring stuff. So there's some great speakers that'll be at the event this year to not only learn the tech, but as you said, you're thinking about the person's career and how do they embrace change and how do they help become more valuable to their company? Yeah, you know, there's two in particular that are going to be joined this year that I'm barely excited about. Once Dr. Brene Brown, and if you haven't seen her TED Talk on YouTube, I highly recommend you go and check it out. It's something different. It's about how do you be vulnerable with yourself, with your career, how you take chances, how do you take risk? And that's a lot of what's going on in our industry right now. The second one I think is to be really fun and that's Anthony Bourdain, known for his show from Parts Unknown. And he's going to have colorful language, right? Noted, some colorful language, but also he's just a riot. He's someone I think is going to bring his special kind of flair to this show and get everyone really excited, laughing and maybe a little bit of gasping in terms of what he's going to be sharing with us. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, New Orleans is a great culinary destination. So I know everybody that's going there. You want to check out the music, the culture and a lot going in there. All right, so excited about the show. We're going to have the cube there for two days. Last thing I want to talk to you about, Ben, just Nutanix as a company, when I registered for the show, there was one of the questions that I thought was pretty interesting. They said, what do you think Nutanix is? What's your relationship with Nutanix? And I'm trying to remember. I know one of the options was, is Nutanix a hyper-converged infrastructure player? Are they a cloud player? I think storage might even be in there. It's been one of those things as to, well, who is Nutanix? What are you today and what do you want to be in the next phase of growth? You know, it's a great question to do. Who is Nutanix? We are focused on helping our customers build their enterprise cloud. Our tagline is going to be your enterprise cloud. Enterprise cloud is not only how you modernize your own data center, but it's also how do you embrace? How do you have a strategy? How do you govern? How do you bring together the right workload for the right cloud platform at the right time? And that's the direction we're taking with our innovation. This is what more and more of our customers are looking to do. Not every application's going to a public cloud provider, not every application staying on-premise. We're going to be living in this hybrid world. Enterprise cloud is about how do you take the ingredients of hyper-converged infrastructure, take the ingredients of automation and management over these different workloads across these different environments and do so in a way that makes the complexity of infrastructure and multiple cloud management make that all invisible. So for us, that's our mission. It's building that enterprise cloud and making all that complexity go away. And that's the vision we're going to be talking about. And that's what we think our attendees, they're really looking to get the guidance and kind of the vision of how they move their careers forward and flourish in that space. Ben, it's the barometer I've been using for probably the last two years. If I, they spend a lot more time in kind of the DevOps cloud native, you know, worlds these days. We were at an Amazon summit yesterday, but absolutely, it's a heterogeneous world. IT is never, you know, let's throw out the old and start from new. Sure, there's some new companies that might do that, but it's a heterogeneous world. It's a multi-cloud world and big struggle for people is how do they get their arms around it? So if I look at a company that has started mostly on premises, it's like, how are you evolving? How are you working with the public cloud? You know, Nutanix has been working very closely with Google over the last year or so. And the acquisition recently that I know plays into this whole story. So maybe tell us a little bit about the acquisition and you know, how does Nutanix look at itself? Which is now, I mean, if you read the Wall Street reports, Nutanix is a software company and you're getting great multiples on that and it's helping. And you know, I've been pretty vocal on this from its early days is, you know, Nutanix was never a hardware company. It, you know, building an appliance was a go-to-market choice to simplify and make it easy for customers. But as the company matured, it made a lot more options. And today it makes perfect sense that really software is where it goes. So, you know, let's talk about a bunch of things there, but specifically kind of the multi-cloud and the acquisition first. Yeah, you know, Stu, we're really excited about this recent acquisition we made. It's a company called Minjar. And the offering is essentially, it's going to be integrated into our broader software platform that allows customers to be able to assess on a real-time basis, what's the right cloud platform for a particular workload from a costing perspective, from a reliability standpoint. Deerish talks about the laws of the land, the laws of physics and the like. You need to apply these all to determine what you're going to run where. And what we got with this Minjar acquisition is a really sophisticated way that our customers can embrace as part of their enterprise cloud. Because part of this is taking back control over all this disaggregation of workloads running everywhere. You're losing control, losing governance of your data and your applications. If you don't really keep on top of it, this acquisition, I believe, is going to be a really key part of helping IT organizations regain that control. Yet still enjoy all the benefits of hybrid cloud environments, whether it be with an AWS and Azure, a Google cloud platform, like we're partnering very closely with, as well as what they're building with their enterprise cloud on-premise with Nutanix. Yeah, it reminds me of what progressive insurance I think has. We're going to give you quotes on all of the things there. Cloud is complicated these days. Is there bias towards it pushing towards, you know, Nutanix's closer partners and the technology itself? Yeah, I mean, it certainly has. There's a lot of complexity around that. And to me, the industry hasn't solved a lot of new complexity that has come out of the emerging trend of a different line of business starting to develop a new application out in a certain cloud platform or the like. And as you're seeing this demand for more application mobility between clouds, and so all of a sudden the partners that are coming to us and the partners we're seeing and are demanded of that we work with in the market, are players that are looking at application automation, players that are looking at DevOps tools and the like. And it both guides how we innovate on our calm platform, which we introduced last year at .next, as well it helps us expand our reach. So we talked to our traditional buyers, but there's a lot of new buyers now that are building those apps, managing those environments. And we're going to start to see some of those come into the .next show. All right, Ben, I want to give you the final word. .next is one of the many events. I know you do lots of regional shows and the like. What should we expect to see from Nutanix through 2018? Yeah, you know, the first thing is the dialogue, the narrative for the company that we're going out with, we've moved to be a software-only company. And I think our customers tell us, and I heard this from one of our largest retail industry customers just a few weeks ago, by moving to a software-only model, it's given them freedom to take advantage of Nutanix regardless of their hardware platforms. And like you said, we've never been a hardware company. It's all been about software value. And what you're going to see from us is a new narrative, an expansion of the brand of Nutanix, talking about the freedom we give for customers to build the data center they've always wanted to build, freedom to run the application or the workload that they've wanted to run, where they choose to run it, based on that insight I talked about. And another realm of freedom to play, freedom to get their weekends back. And a lot of our value proposition, because of all the complexity we've taken out of the equation, is we give our customers their weekends back. This is a story that our Nutanix attendees, I think know better than others, but we want to spread the word. And so part of that is harnessing that freedom concept to build, to run, to play, to invent, and tell the world. And Nutanix, whether it be in New Orleans, which I think is going to be a blast when we take it to Europe and London, and we do this all around the world. To me, that's kind of ground zero for that story, for the community of what we built together with our customers and partners, and that's what we take out to the world. All right, well, Ben Gibson, glad we could introduce you to our community today, because we're going to be seeing you at lots of other events, you and your team. Of course, the CUBE will be at Nutanix.next in New Orleans, Nutanix and you will be at the Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Google Cloud Next, happening this summer in San Francisco, lots of other shows. So be sure to tune in to thecube.net, get the list of all the upcoming shows, Ben, Nutanix, and of course, lots of the cloud and infrastructure ecosystem. Check it all out, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.