 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, 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 Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Monica Kumar. She is the SVP product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. Sure, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. So the last time we met, we were in Anaheim at the last big Nutanix conference, and you were fresh into the job six weeks in, and now you're seven months in. This is after a 22 year career at Oracle, so you're a tech veteran. But tell us a little bit about how it's going, what you've seen so far, why the opportunity appealed and if it's living up to what your expectations were. It's been an absolute adventure at Nutanix. Actually it's going to be close to eight months now, and it was a bit scary for me to take the plunge after 26 years in the tech industry. I've had a fulfilling career, but there was actually a couple reasons why Nutanix was so appealing to me, and it's been a fantastic ride so far. One was this intense focus on providing technology that's so innovative, that it's geared to simplifying IT's life and geared towards business outcomes. But there's a bigger goal for Nutanix, which really drew me to the company, which is this obsession with customer delight and providing outstanding customer experience. So here I am, almost eight months later, I'm living it in the Nutanix world and hoping we're delighting customers as well as we go along. Manaka, it's very much a different company. I look at Oracle and Nutanix. Many of the Nutanix executives and team have background in Oracle. Oracle, software at its heart and helped deliver one of the stickiest applications in enterprise as well as a role in IT. I mean, the DBA is there. Lot of discussion here at the show about moving from the discussion of hyperconverged to hybrid cloud. Give us your thought as to where you see your customers today, kind of the state of the industry and where you see Nutanix fitting in going beyond hyperconverged into the broader cloud discussion. Yeah, I think that's a great question to set up the contacts. If I think about companies like Oracle, Nutanix and some of the larger software companies that have been around for a while, there's a lot of commonality I think between them, right? One is catering to enterprise customers. So even the Nutanix is only 10 years old. I was surprised as to how many big global 2000 companies, big brands actually use Nutanix today. So we've actually almost been born in the enterprise and now we're expanding out to the commercial space. So by that what I mean is when you're born in the enterprise you know how important data centers are to our customers. They've invested huge amounts, in some cases billions of dollars, to create these fully functional data centers that are hosting all the applications and data and all the business critical databases in the data center, right? And now they're trying to figure out how do they bring agility and flexibility and speed while preserving all this investment made in the data centers. So I think from that perspective, we very much understand it's about helping our customers who've built big data centers on premises to bring cloud agility to those customers, whether it's on premises or in public cloud and actually the combination of both is where hybrid comes in. So what is the status of things in terms of where are most companies at right now? Would you say? Yeah, interestingly we've run a number of surveys and in 2018 when we ran the survey around hybrid cloud, 86% of the survey respondents said that's the IT model they would prefer. Because you know, they can exponentially enhance the computing resources. They can actually without investing money in wheeling and servers and storage and space and cooling, they can actually advance and expand the stack that they can deploy applications, right? So it's the most preferred IT model. However, there's lots of issues in making it a reality. And I think we can talk about that. Almost 70% said they would love to make it a preferred model, but they are unable to deploy it because of multiple reasons. Yeah, it's interesting. When I think of what I've heard from customers, for years and years you go talk to IT and they say, I don't have enough headcount, I don't have enough money, I can't keep up. Yet, some of the new deployment models, oh my gosh, you're going to put me out of a job. You know, I won't be able to do anything. It's like, wait, I thought you didn't have time to do any of the things you want to do and didn't have enough money. If we could make it easier, if some of the pieces could be invisible or just handled, you could go work on all of those other projects that you've been wanting to. How's Nutanix helping customers through kind of that transition to, as you said, they want agility, they want choice, they need to be able to have IT be a participant with if not a driver for the business. Yes, you know, if you think about in the last decade, IT has been very focused on infrastructure modernization or what we call data center modernization. So whatever we have, we want to make it simple, cut costs, so it's most efficient. And I think that's a great, I think initiative to embark on, but it's almost very inside, inward centric, right? It's about how do I make my life easy? Make myself more productive, cut costs in my org. I think if we turn it around to customer delight and IT wanting to delight their customers and really focus on becoming a service organization, that's when things start changing. Because now we are talking about consumerization of IT. You know, in our lives, we all are so used to delight, you know, our smartphone response, as soon as we click something or swipe something, we get the answers, you know, there's lots of things in lives that have changed where it's instant gratification in a way. And I think companies are also asking and demanding that of IT. It's like, hey, if I want IT resources, I want it right away. So I think IT as an organization is changing and really focusing more on becoming a service organization and delighting their customers. And that's where automation comes in. That's where cutting down all the manual tasks which a machine or a robot or software can do, so the human being can focus on what's more important to them. What's more strategic? And I think that's where having and choosing the right platform comes in. So that IT can provide more resilient services and really provide services at the speed the business is demanding. So to me, I think that's where companies like Nutanix come in where we can help IT become that service organization. So when you're talking about this evolution of IT, I mean, what does that mean for the skills that become the in-demand skills? What does that mean for how IT is placed within an organization and how it interacts with other functions? I mean, how does this change really manifest itself? Yeah, and I think to your point as well as to, I think IT has to become a change agent. No longer can IT just be in a supporting role and just help advance the business. Because I think now, businesses are realizing that if they don't delight customers, they can't really grow. They won't stay competitive. So IT has to become that change agent to use technology to advance and grow the business. And I think from that perspective, if you look at IT admin, CIS admin, storage admins, database admin administrators, all of them need to start thinking about what is the next level of skill set which makes me become more of a dev ops or a data ops person or an IT ops person as it was so simply just administering something, simply patching provisioning is not good enough anymore. There needs to be some element of programming, some element of continuous delivery and some element of bridging the gap between a public and private cloud solution where apps can run on both places, where data can be in both places. So we do want the IT skill sets to evolve in a way that they can become more cloud engineers in my opinion, as opposed to staying administrators. Yeah, Monica, I had a great discussion with a customer earlier in the show and he said that what customers, what we used to do in IT is follow the rules and what I don't want you doing in the future is following the rules. I want you to try things, I want you to try to break things and they felt that Nutanix was a platform that enabled them to be able to do that. Yes, absolutely. I think IT is in such a powerful position today to drive change and really by up leveling the skills, the IT administrators would realize they become more strategic to the organization but they even have better prospects for themselves like individually, right? You know, I think they can do so much better in their career as well. Yeah, there's the great line that the executives say, what if we train our people up on new stuff and they leave and the response is, what if we don't and they stay? Yes, I totally agree. It's a danger. So in terms of this evolution of IT as a functional unit in an organization and also as a human being who just works in the industry, we're talking about all these changes. How is it also changing the way organizations work? Do you know what I'm saying? In the sense of how is this evolution of IT driving change in the workplace? Absolutely. I think some of the old silos are breaking. I mean, just let's use Nutanix as an example. When we first came out with a hyperconverged infrastructure solution, we broke the silos between compute storage and virtualization. You know, there was- Altogether now. Exactly, altogether now, exactly. So there was, you know, sysadmins, storage admins, already with using hyperconvergence, they started to work together. Now more so as DevOps becomes, like I said, you know, it's DevOps, AIOps, ITOps, dataOps. I think we're going to start seeing the organizations merging almost, right? And maybe there won't be a need for having a separate, you know, DBA versus a separate, you know, storage admin versus a separate sysadmin. Maybe we are going to a place where it's going to be DevOps or some ops, you know, all ops, that organization, that's going to help create the platform for apps and data working together. Because the technology will be so seamless and so simple to actually use, that they can focus on the process that they need to create within the organization to deploy the technology and benefit from it. All right, Monica, since you've now been at the company almost eight months, wondering if there's anything now being on the inside that you've learned that you'd say, gee, I wish more people on the outside understood this about Nutanix. Yes, absolutely. I think the one thing which I knew coming in, but you don't really realize it until you actually realize it and you internalize it, it really is the intense focus we have on customer success. I mean, we live and breathe by that. Every single person from executive level down. And I'll give you a very small example. About two months ago, I got an email, just random email from somebody saying, hey, I just bought Nutanix, you know, last week and I'm having some issue and I just saw you join Nutanix. You know, I want to reach out to you. So at first I thought, hmm, but I responded and I said, well, I'm glad you reached out to me. Is there anybody you're working with at Nutanix? And turns out he was working with some channel partner and somebody. He gave me a name. Within 24 hours, we had done enough troubleshooting internally to figure out what the problem was. I reached back out to him saying, you're going to get your part that you need. And within 48 hours, he had his part and he emailed me saying, thank you so much. And by the way, this was a really small customer in terms of the size of the opportunity we had. But it doesn't matter to us. Every customer counts and every customer's success is paramount to us. It's an all hands on deck kind of place. It is an all hands on deck kind of thing. Yeah, so I can say to me, even though I knew going into it that that's a big core philosophy, but to live it is, it's a totally different level. Great. Well, Monica, thank you so much. And congrats on the new job. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dot Next.