 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's program. We're the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage. Happy to bring back to the program, fresh off the keynote. So Neil Pote, who is the Chief Product and Development Officer with Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining me. All right, so big crowd. I mean, 1,200, 1,300 people here, first European show. I mean, bigger than it was in Miami last year, so first congratulations. Yeah, thank you so much. In fact, I think it was a last minute hustle for our marketing team, because I think the room was, like, for 800, 900 people's understanding. My understanding is, if you work for Nutanix, you're pushed out in the hallway. It's, you know, customers, partners, everything like that. I guess we took over the bars from last night for seeing the live streaming. Yeah, and, I mean, kudos to the team, because first of all, I mean, Nutanix, you've been under great growth. Everybody's super excited with the IPO, but just, I know the blocking and tackling of the event team to get everything moving and support this. We went from a one hotel event to I think you're spread across four hotels, breakout sessions. I hear people are going after the keynote to do some sessions to repeat them, so that everybody that comes can kind of learn about all the stuff that you walked through in the keynote this morning. Yeah, I mean, I think we are really gratified with the support that we have seen from the European audience for this particular conference. I think it started off with trying to figure out can we actually go beyond our first annual conference? And now, as you said, we are almost 50% larger in terms of attendance, in terms of show of support, right? So, Sunil, I kind of liked the framework that you laid out. You said there's storage to virtualization to cloud. I think I've been saying for years is, you know, I mean, storage, you know, we want to get out of the storage business. Even most of the storage companies are kind of understanding about solutions and moving up the stack. We saw, you know, the largest storage company was just acquired, you know, finished the acquisition there. So, that's been changing. But maybe walk us through kind of the thinking of, you know, what that means, what that cloud vision that you're looking for. Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to do so. So, I think at a pretty high level, we used to talk about these as three acts for the company between making storage invisible, making virtualization invisible, and then eventually making cloud as in public cloud versus private cloud. The convergence of that happened. I think at a pretty high level, I think there's clarity now in our evolution of this company. I think we are at a pretty, you know, an inflection point where, you know, we are a part of two acts for the company and we are in the middle of the first act is what I say. This is essentially the first act is about bringing the one click experience of a public cloud like Amazon or Azure to the enterprise. And that has to obviously, you know, cover virtualization, compute and storage. And today we announced that we're extending that to also networks and security. And so that'll take us a while to kind of finish the job. But essentially that's the gist of what act one is about. And probably be a 15 year rollout. We're in the middle of that. And at a pretty high level, I think what you're going to see coming out next year is the emergence of act two where the convergence moves from infrastructure to the convergence of consumption models, whether it be public cloud, private cloud, CAPEX, OPEX, however, essentially think about it as making hybrid invisible. So that's what's coming next. Yeah, and you use the analogy of Amazon. You said Amazon is dot com with a one click and it's also AWS with the cloud. I think, you know, Amazon's been around for a while now, but we're still trying to see that play out. And as you talked about on the, even that one click simplicity for infrastructure, people are still trying to wrap their heads around it. You guys are have great growth, but it's still early for both of those things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the way we summarized our view at least as part of this act one of one click convergence was the fact that, you know, if Amazon, if you look at people who look at Amazon and say, oh, we are the AWS for the enterprise, but it's really, you know, there's two primary innovations, which is the dot com experience, which consumerized the consumption experience, plus also the web scale, cloud delivery architectures, right? So I think one of the things that keeps us honest as a company is to ensure that we provide the one click experience along with the web scale fabric. So that's part of what we talked about today was the fact that we can provide that one click experience across any kind of workload, whether it be files, bare metal, you know, virtual machines or containers, across any kinds of deployments, whether it be enterprise or a robot and so forth, and across any kind of infrastructure, whether it be virtualization, compute storage, as well as networking. Right, so, Sunil, big question, you know, we've all as an industry been kind of grappling with is that, you know, what happens to the CIO? What is this role going forward? Do we need a new name for, you know, what the CIO role does? What's your task? Yeah, yeah, I mean, thanks for the setup question. So, you know, I mean, I think, you know, the way I, you know, we have internalized this is the fact that, look, I think every CIO, the way I say it is going to be a CIO, which is, you know, today every CIO pretty much is asked by the CIO to say, look, all my businesses are going to Amazon or otherwise in the cloud, and, you know, my only option is to now rotate towards the public cloud. And as we've always talked about, really what a CIO needs to do is to become a chief Amazon officer in the sense that they should be able to react to their businesses and provide the same level of experience that a public cloud provides, but for the right workloads. So for certain workloads, I should provide the same through a single pane of glass, the same experience of consuming Amazon, but at the same way for certain workloads, with the same single pane of glass, same operational SLAs, I should be able to provide a bunch of enterprise workloads. So that I think is the evolution of what a CIO will become is this, you know, where a business user should be able to come to IT and specify the workload that they want deployed and IT is able to react quickly and with a single one click experience provision, the workload, whether it's on Nutanix on-premise or Amazon off-premise. Yeah, so, you know, we're mostly in agreement, I think, on that from a Wikibon standpoint, we put out a little over a year ago now, we called it true private cloud and it said the public cloud is really the benchmark, what we have to look at and say, you know, this is how you measure yourself against and it's not just the price or even the one click, it's that all those operational things, you know, IT, the joke we had is that, you know, enterprise simplicity is an oxymoron because it doesn't exist, so we need to change that environment, so, you know, we like the trend, we're supportive of it, and we absolutely would think, you know, hyper-convergence is one of those first bases on the platform underneath. Yeah, I mean, I think you think about it like, a simple thing that you get from a public cloud is, you don't do upgrades anymore on public cloud, right? They do it magically. Wait, wait, what version of AWS are you running on? Nobody knows that, right, that's exactly the point and I think that's essentially a simplistic way, even though it's very mundane, I think that's the kind of experience that we aim to offer for the enterprises that look, you know, you should be able to just go download the screen, should be able to just like iPhone or a Tesla, show up with a new upgrade, I'll just click on it, go take a coffee break, and my clusters are all updated, and that's essentially what we're seeing already with many of our customers, is this beauty of one click upgrades equates to this experience of a public cloud. All right, so you brought your head of engineering, Rajiv, up during the keynote, and laid it out really well, it's two things, make it simple, and give customers what they need before they need it. I'm going to be at Amazon show at the end of the month, I guarantee you they're going to put a slide up with that bar chart of how many new products and releases they did in the last quarter, in the last year, I mean they are, they turn that flywheel, they keep adding things, how does a little company like Nutanix compete with innovation and growth and features? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I mean, first of all, the size of the company of Nutanix itself has grown, I mean, we are north of almost 750 people in R&D, so it's a pretty hefty organization that's going pretty fast, but that said, I think it obviously has to come down to not just working hard, but working smart, and a lot of this comes down to picking and choosing features that natively need to go into the core product, as we will talk about and so forth, right? Versus features that make and leverage partners, leverage the platform, that otherwise Amazon had to build natively. So a lot of our capabilities are around platformification of this enterprise cloud, so that our partners who are willing to help re-platform the data center, folks like Arista, folks like Palo Alto, folks like F5, Citrix, and so forth, right? I think they can leverage the platform to deliver a true one plus one equals three kind of leverage. Yeah, and just, I want you to clarify, there are some people I talked to, and they're like, oh, you know, boy, that Nutanix is aggressive. They said they're going to take out VMware and they're also going to take out Amazon, and it's like, it doesn't look like you're trying to head on attack on what Amazon's doing. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's a good point, I think, look, I think all companies are aspirational inspiration for us, both VMware and Amazon are inspirational companies to us, right? Clearly, we leverage a lot of ESX footprint out there, but essentially our goal is to provide an Amazon-like experience. So in a sense, in fact, frankly, for us, the way we think about it is that AWS and the whole public cloud way was a huge tailwind, because it allowed customers to believe that something is possible of this scale and magnitude with this level of experience. And that's really what we come in, is we're coming in the tailwinds of Amazon and essentially providing that same level of experience for a majority of the enterprise work. So in that sense, it's very synergistic. Absolutely, that operational model is where we need to kind of, that's the lever that can kind of move IT overall. All right, so Sunil, a lot of announcements, a lot of pieces, we spoke to you back in Vegas. Maybe give us, I believe, 4.7, now 5.0, so Lace here, give us the thumbnail, instead of what the news is. Yeah, so what's the thumbnail? I think there's a bunch of tactical stuff and then I'll talk to you about the strategic stuff. The tactical stuff is around taking the platform and if I can call it, ensuring that it's able to scale to support all workloads. So for example, we announced the fact that not only can we support blocks, files and containers, we now have enterprise workloads such as SAP certified on the HV, we now have Oracle now that has collaborated to be certified there, infrastructure on our block services so that the whole point being that you can now genuinely leverage Nutanix end-to-end all the way from VDI to SharePoint Exchange to your high-end old TP applications. So that was the first sort of, if I can call it, ongoing or iterative capabilities of the platform. Yeah, and congratulations, because you know that, customers are looking, you know, my application, I needed to be certified, you know, Oracle's one, I mean, VMware struggled with that for years as to how that support works. Is that, I saw there's like an Oracle box on the side and that kind of ties in, so is that an Oracle server sitting outside of a Nutanix box, what does that mean? The key is that it's like half of the workloads of Oracle is still running on bare metal. Or the Oracle VM substrate, and essentially our goal is to ensure that, look, right now, they're essentially a silo right now. It's talking to a separate sand and so forth using SCSI, iSCSI, your fiber channel. Now with the Nutanix Acropolis Block Services, while you're running VMs for your traditional applications, the same substrate can now connect seamlessly using iSCSI and the ABS fabric into the Oracle farm, so you're running bare metal servers compute on Oracle, connecting to the Acropolis fabric. And you'd now get the best of both worlds, which is now you can leverage your existing investments of performance and scale, while getting the simplicity of one click scale out, operations, upgrades and all that stuff. Right, so a couple of applications you mentioned, file now, containers, a lot of things there. Yeah, so I think that's the first sort of series of announcements around making sure that you can support block level interface, native file services so that VDI users, for example, user directories don't have to recite on a separate NAS environment. It can now be consolidated into the same Nutanix fabric with Acropolis file services. And then of course now, with next generation apps being built on containers, the fact that you don't have to manage VMs separately than containers, and two, the fact that containers should transcend beyond being stateless from a deployment perspective to actually provide real, stateful support a la storage functionality built into the nature of it. So that's what ACS does, is provides the same power of storage and compute convergence that we did for VMs to the container level. So that's the first series of things, right? So I think the sort of like the next sort of layer, which is part of our conversation that we talked about at the beginning was about how do we actually take the next step function to make one click enterprise cloud work now that we've done it for compute storage and visualization. And that's where the one click networks announcement comes into play. So I don't know if you wanted to dive into any particular area. Let's talk about networking. So you guys, you're not coming out with a new switch. You're not, you know, not a hardware company. And, you know, you want to develop it. How many hardware engineers do you have on your team? We have a reasonable set of hardware engineers that are system guys. So just like think about it as the Apple hardware construct, but it's a minority as compared to the software by a far amount. Big tech. Big tech. And so talk, you had a wrist up on stage. You had a big logo slide. Yeah, yeah. It's a software partners both on the security side as well as kind of the network side. So definitely understand, you know, networking. We start scaling out these configurations. You know, network is going to be key. So, you know, where does Nutanix add to that? And, you know, what's yours? Yeah, I mean, let me start with maybe the why, right? And then we'll talk about the what and the how. So the why is essentially people used to come to us all the time logically to your point and say, hey, what about the easiest thing is, why don't you put a network switch inside your box and reduce some cabling and so forth? In our opinion, I think the data plane of networking, and we have a lot of partners out there that have shown the fabric evolution of ethernet switching, whether it's fine leaf or the various architectures. To us, the problem doesn't lie there. The problem lies in the control plane of networking. IE, today folks come to us, they use Prism and they say with one click I can understand whether VM is slow because of my memory or my computer allocation or my storage capabilities. But if my packets are dropped on the way to the top of the rack, I have no idea. If there's a port misconfigured, I have no idea. There's a virtual network in the Nutanix fabric, how does that coexist with my physical network? You know, all these things, right? So that was the genesis of what we embodied over the last 12 to 18 months when we started developing one click networks was the fact that it falls into like three major categories, which is visualize. So I have to first understand what's happening in the network. Whether it be, oh, here are my VMs and here are all the ports that they're connected to, here's my packet loss and I cry. So, and that's where the first set of functionality is around network visualization. The second set of functionality, which is a pretty big leap beyond visualization, is to help orchestrate network provisioning, for example. Every time VMs come up, a VLAN is required and we should be able to notify a Resta or any of the top of the rack switches so that there's a turn-cree VLAN provisioning and stuff like that, right? So there, the network orchestration starts with basic L2, L3 configuration. That's where we've shown demonstration with Resta, Brocade, Plexi and a whole bunch of other vendors, but also moves up the stack to layer four to seven, where whether it's a Citrix Netscaler or an F5 big IP or a Palo Alto firewall, any of these services can be inserted seamlessly into the platform fabric so that you can now say, oh, for these 10 VMs, I can now insert a load balancing rule or a security policy, but when 10 more VMs pop up, the load balancing pool is automatically updated. So that's the two prongs of visualization and orchestration. And then there was a third thing, if you noticed. So security? Yeah, yeah. Security was the thing that we had to think hard and deep about, because obviously there's a layer of security that is dramatically changing with next-generation security, F5 walling and so forth. The part that people came to us for was that, look, when I go to Amazon again, or AWS, not only when I consume EC2 and S3, I not only do I not, hypervisor is invisible, management is invisible, but I also get things like security groups, like my segmentation, my native application segments are just built into the core fabric, right? So what if we could do that and provide that same flexibility capability to the mainstream enterprise? And that's why we announced, in the classic Nutanix fashion, the fact that micro segmentation now on AHE is natively built in. Essentially what you can do now do is, just like you would go into Prism and say, oh, here are my apps, I'm going to group these apps into my web tier, my database tier, or different kinds of application workloads. And when I provision them, before provisioning, there's a very simple interface which simply says, put them in a segment. And once you segment it under the cover, the policies and the rules are updated across the cluster in that single one click, so that now a customer can come in and say, hey, oh, guess what? Production is completely isolated from development. Oh, by the way, just for debugging, I can give you one-time access from development into production, but then disable that rule very quickly. And those are the kinds of things that you can now do without requiring a completely discreet overlay network or a completely discreet set of products on top. This is all going to be built into the core fabric. Yeah, definitely that native micro segmentation for security is hugely important. We've talked to a number of your partners out there, Palo Alto, Lumio, Juniper, we were at their conference recently. I need to have that granularity and security needs to become pervasive, so if you're to be a platform, you need to tie into all of that. Yeah, I mean, I think the key is just like we built in one-click upgrades. We want to just basically take these complicated operations that add friction from an enterprise perspective. And we think that one-click security policies always tends to be one of them. One-click, you know, VLAN provisioning tends to be one of them. So that's really how we looked at this and said, okay, what are the things in the control plane of a data center that we need to remove complexity from so that we can eventually get to this one-click concept? Yeah, one of the lines I loved in your keynote, you talked about making vCenter invisible. Now, I know lots of people, they love vCenter, they use it, and it's not saying, you had a tool, let's replace it. We want to take out all of those things that you just, you know, those rote things, those manual things, those repeated things that we've been doing for so long. We don't need to do it anymore. Let's set up the policies. You've got puppet as a part, you've got others, you know, if I can automate those, still have the humans set everything up and understand where they need to be, but, you know, there's only so many arms and legs we can throw at this problem. So, I mean, I think that particular angle was just a preview to, I think our, you know, our evolution into Act 2, which is about this convergence of consumption model, which is essentially, it simply says that, look, essentially what a customer really needs to do is to not go through multiple panes of glass. They need a single interface that is simple. The tooling has to be homogenized or converged. Now, for any large enterprise, they cannot ever choose a single full stack, right? They will have different stacks. And so the goal of Act 2 for us, and that's what you're talking about when we say making recent and invisible happens to be the first feature that's coming out and we'll talk more about other things in the future, is the fact that you can go into something like Prism and say, look, let me model a workload. Now, this particular workload, I should be able to understand inside our environment by either tapping into their existing workload that's running on a non-neutonics or a neutonics to understand the working set and the capacity profile. And then from it, apply some SLAs or some other things, and cost or whatever. And then from it, the system should recommend, oh, should we deploy it on this kind of infrastructure, which is a neutonics-powered, maybe existing, we stack something or an Amazon stack, right? And with one click, I should be able to provision that across any of these environments. And then go the full circle of saying, look, okay, when I provision production on neutonics, for example, I should be able to right click and just say snapshot creator dev environment on AWS. And it should just be that simple. And to do that, it's just not a management plain problem because you got to move data. And our roots in data, data distribution, data application, data consistency, I think that's the core thing that's going to make us different as why we were able to make hybrid invisible down there. So, Sunil, I'm curious, next year's going to be a really interesting year in the enterprise space. Microsoft's supposed to have Azure Stack, finally come to the marketplace. Amazon and VMware, cats and dogs living together, those two have partners. You look at the space, how do some of those moves impact what you're doing? How do you think about that? You've been kind of leading the way from the traditional to there, but some of those big guys are coming to you. I mean, I think it's a great question. And I think, look, some of them will be a co-operative play in just the way these things work as companies scale out. But I think my sense is that if you think about our first phase or first act, right? I mean, we had to fight mostly not against hyper-conversion competitors, but we fought against the traditional architecture. That was our chasm to cross. And now pretty much everybody is now primarily leading with this architecture. So we have won the architecture battle, is what I would say in the first act. And now we just have to make sure that HONEST products differentiate ourselves. So I think a similar chasm will occur in the next few years of making hybrid invisible. And there's a layer of, as Dheeraj said in his keynote, as you can see, there's always something that will precede the true solution, such as preceding hyper-converged was converged, which was meant to do what hyper-converged did. And so we had the FlexPod VBlock equivalents. And I think there will be a similar FlexPod VBlock equivalents for the hybrid cloud. And there already are, by the way. In our opinion, the recent announcements that you've seen already, in our opinion, fall into that category. I think there will be a true, you know, hyper-converged offering for the hybrid cloud. That has to be engineered for the ground up. That has to make it look like, you know, I have an iPhone running some apps and suddenly I have iCloud suddenly plugged in to my camera, it uses my hardware, it uses the software, but it's completely invisible. That, in our opinion, is the way that we are approaching that market to differentiate ourselves. So, Sunil, unfortunately, we've got way more things to talk about than we're going to have time for. So, since we can't go through all the SMB robo, some of the other pieces. Next year, DC's, where we've got the Nutanix show, you showed a little bit of leg and now some of the pieces, but what should we be looking for, your team, from the development? Yeah, I think the first thing is to make sure that whatever we've announced today, obviously from a product delivery perspective, some of it is coming out immediately, some of it is coming out over the next, you know, end months. I think we're going to be looking for a lot of those to hit the market, be consumed, be traded on, to ensure that things like one-click networks, visualization, orchestration, micro-segmentation are actually in play, supported, the ability to actually manage multiple hypervisors are all in play and so forth. So that's going to be a big thing that we're going to re-emphasize and reinforce. But as I mentioned, I think that next dot next is going to be, I think, you know, we're going to be priming the pump for the next six months to unveil what it means to actually make hybrid invisible. So that's going to be a big thing to look for. So Neil Pote, always great to catch up with you. Thanks so much. We'll be back with our next guest here at the Nutanix dot next conference in Europe. You're watching theCUBE.