 from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, everybody. This is day two of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference. Hashtag nextconf, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and my name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. As I say, this is day two, and today the keynotes were in the morning. Yesterday they were in the afternoon. So when we left you yesterday, we went right into the keynotes with CEO D. Raj Pandey, who gave a very, as he always does, Stu, a very philosophical, deep sort of discussion, a lot of commentary from thought leaders and some customers, and somewhat long, although shorter than last year, but that's how Nutanix likes to do things. They want you to bake and savor what's going on in their community and their ecosystem. Today it was all about product. Sunil Poti got up and he basically took us through the products, the new innovations, the strategies, and that's what we're going to unpack this morning in the next couple of minutes, and then go deeper throughout the day. So Stu, it's all about cloud. Two years ago, at the first, the inaugural .NEXT Conference, Nutanix laid out a strategy of moving beyond hyperconverged infrastructure. This is at a time when everybody was pivoting to hyperconverged from the traditional converged or the legacy infrastructure, and they laid out this sort of long-term, a little bit fuzzy vision about supporting cloud and multi-cloud. At the time, it was really focused on migrating off of VMware onto other platforms, but they sort of teased us with a vision of cloud. Today, we saw that vision come into a little bit more clarity, but there's still a lot of questions. So give me your summary on the keynote today, and specifically, this Nutanix strategy of being the cloud operating system. Yeah, and Dave, I think vision is the right term, because unlike previous announcements by Nutanix, a lot of what they laid out here are things that are in development. So, you know, the two big announcements they talked about yesterday and went through a little bit more today. Calm, which was an acquisition that they had made last year, really to be able to help them try to be that management across multi-clouds. That's in process. I believe if I remember right, it's second half of this year, it will be shipping. I got a note from a friend of mine, and they're like, okay, this is the 687th product in the industry that's trying to solve this problem, because everybody is trying to solve this problem. Microsoft wants to be the player here. Companies like CA want to be in the lead here. Of course, Amazon would like to manage everything, just put it on Amazon. So, why is Nutanix positioned to be the control plane layer of a multi-cloud world? Nutanix is a small player, so they've got some good pieces. They're starting to touch some of the environments, but I'm not sure. And the second one, the Z or G cloud services? That's not sure. Z, Z, G. Yeah, it's spelled X-I, and we've heard multiple pronunciations. We'll get Sunil on this. X-I is, as you told me this morning, is the last two letters of Nutanix flipped. Yeah, so it's a DR service that they're going to deploy. It's in development right now. I don't think we know anything about pricing yet. It's not going to ship till the first half of next year. Is the target for that? But really lays out as to, I think we want to get to the Google relationship and beyond, how does Nutanix get to be more than just an on-premises infrastructure layer. They've already sold to service riders. I've talked to companies that not only build their infrastructure but sell services based on using Nutanix as an infrastructure, but they're going to take that full Nutanix stack and make it available in Google. Data centers around the world and we expect them to expand those partnerships. And what Sunil was hitting on at the end of his keynote is the terminology they use is you're cloud native. Your mode one applications, a lot of times those start in the public cloud and sometimes those come back to an infrastructure like a Nutanix where I can run it in a similar kind of operational model and then do we take our mode two applications, you know, kind of the big legacy, the thousands of applications that we have, do we try to shove those into the public cloud and the challenge there is if it's not the same stack on both ends, it's not the same operating model, there's challenges and I know we want to tease that out a little bit. Well, so Stu, I had a conversation with Paul Moritz in 2009 where he said to me, the advantage, and it's pretty clear, the advantage that Amazon and Google and Facebook have is that they have homogeneity in their data centers. And he said, for us to succeed in cloud, we have to have homogeneity both on-prem and in the cloud. And so he sort of, you know, at that point indicated that the VMware strategy was going to be putting essentially VMware in these clouds and the cloud service providers, as we all know, that manifested itself in vCloud Air. We've heard this story before, how is this different? Yeah, so first of all, vCloud Air, I think most people agree a failed strategy. Who would not agree with that? Right, right, right. So, the biggest challenges, you know, we saw vCloud Air when I talked to the community is, you know, VMware said, wait, we're going to build it ourselves and run it. And customers were like, well, I've got lots of partners. And they were like, well, we'll partner with like Savvis. And like Savvis made no margin on this, couldn't do anything else. They tried to go to lots of other service providers and they were, I don't know how I add services, I don't know how I add value. So how is this different? And, right, you look at this and say, okay, well Nutanix is going to start with building it themselves because they want to understand it. I've talked to service providers here that say, hey Nutanix, we have experience and we know how to do this, we could advise you on this. So, you know, of course, Nutanix, they didn't come out and say like, this is the future. Everybody run every service on this. They say, hey, we're working on a DR solution. We're a little bit measured. This is where we're going. So, you know, I think there's time to mature. Time for Nutanix to work with their partner ecosystems. The Google announcement, I think, gives Nutanix credibility, but a lot of it is kind of pressurally slideware, if you will. You say, okay, great, I'm going to take Z and run it on GCP. Well, this is a product next year that maybe you'll probably run somewhere with Google. You know, where's the details? Okay, so talk about lift and shift. Yeah, thanks Dave. So where we talked yesterday to one of the doers, one of the practitioners of Nutanix, they said, hey, I'm looking at containers. And we said, hey, are you looking at Nutanix for this? They say, well, now that I hear they're working with Google, who's obviously a thought leader, and driving that, that will drive them closer to us. So, question is, the Z Cloud Service is based on AHV. So if I bought in, you know, there are some customers who say, I want a virtualized environment that I can mirror, but most of us look at it and say, virtualization is kind of heavy for taking something to more of the public cloud. If I containerize, then I can use Kubernetes and I can move applications a little more. So, you know, debate we're having internally, Dave, you know, often is, how much of the stack do I have to have the complete hardware all the way through on both ends? Do I have something like Kubernetes, which allows me to take containerized applications and move them? Because lift and shift, it really, I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit and it said, well, let me build my new applications on the platform and then I'll start migrating some over so I have that shared management platform to hold the environment, but it's challenging. Same thing we've had discussed in Amazon. There's certain applications we build there. Amazon would love you to take all of your applications, but it's not trivial. Porting something over is not easy as one of the points that Nutanix is making and we've heard, you know, from the community that Amazon really doesn't want you just trying to, you know, lift the whole thing and shift it, you should be doing some refactoring or start pulling apart your application. They want you to change the operating model. So Stu, is this a blind spot for Nutanix? Let me back up. We asked Pat Gelsinger when Docker and CoreOS came on the scene, what does that mean for you? He said, hey, we've got the best container in the world. It's VMware. And we all kind of went, I don't know. So is this a similar headwind potentially? Is this a threat that Nutanix is so VM focused versus containerized or can they just embrace containers? Well, great question, something I want to pose to the Nutanix executives today because Dave, there's multiple paths forward. When we asked Amazon similar questions, they said to get from, you know, your legacy data centers, public cloud, here are the eight, you know, ours as to refactor, re-platform, redo this, things like that. So there's more than one solution. As we know, customers have lots of applications. There's some that, you know, you're going to leave them sitting on, you know, that old hardware in the back corner and run it until that thing- Running on VMS. Absolutely, Dave. Many of those things got moved into VM environments and are going to stay there for a while. So unfortunately, everything in IT tends to be additive and, you know, we never seem to, you know, we've got all of the, you know, what's the, I've got the, you know, debt of- Yeah, Don Tapscott, God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base, the technical debt. Technical debt. All right, Stu, we got to wrap. This is day two of Nutanix. We're going all day long. Today, heavy executive partner and customer day. We certainly have, we have Sunil coming on. We're going to go deep on products. Chad Sackich, coming on from Dell EMC. We got D Raj, of course, the CEO. Stay tuned, everybody. Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back, right after this short break.