 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2018, 14th annual Winslow Technology Group User Conference. New name, happy to be back here at the heart of Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park. And welcome back to the program. Who is now a senior systems engineering manager with Nutanix. Mike, great to see you. It's a pleasure to be here, Stu. Thanks for having me again, really appreciate it. I can't believe it's been a year since we last talked. It hasn't been quite a year. They moved it from August to June. Okay, all right. That makes me feel a little bit better. Which means we'll have less people on vacation. There's more people here. Gorgeous sunny day. And Mike, one of the reasons I love doing this, I get to talk to a lot of users, and especially up here in my backyard, you talk to them all the time. So give me kind of the sentiment of, what are you hearing from users these days? What's kind of top of mind? What's bringing them to Winslow Technology and Nutanix these days? Yeah, I think top of mind for everybody is cloud, right? A lot of people are talking about what it's going to take to move workloads and to the cloud. And it's really understanding that in having conversations with customers to explain to them that cloud is, you have a lot of choice and flexibility with cloud today. It's not about moving applications to your Amazon web services or Azure or Google. Although that makes sense for some applications, cloud's truly an operating model, right? So explain to them that, yeah, you can still maintain your on-premises infrastructure to maintain the control that you need and also control your costs where it makes sense. But there are certain applications that certainly benefit from running on-prem as well as the public cloud. Yeah, Mike, I love that you brought up applications because sometimes, you know, we've got a lot of infrastructure people here. We're talking about servers. We're talking about networking and storage and the whole wave of conversion, even hyper-converged. There was so much focus on, well, let's take that infrastructure, let's package it a little different. We, of course, want to make it simple. We want to change the operating model. But it's really about those applications. What lives where? Give us, what's the mindset customers have for HCI near and dear to Nutanix's heart? It was certain applications that usually drove that initially helped us bring together kind of the infrastructure and the applications in an HCI standpoint. Sure, sure. Well, you know, I think many customers were initially drawn to Nutanix for the simplicity that we bring to the data center, right? Eliminating the kind of the three tier, as we call three tier silos of complexity. And within IT, it really is all about the applications and that's becoming more and more apparent. You know, businesses don't want to spend money, you know, paying people to configure infrastructure, right? So, but until, you know, relatively recently, there was still certain applications that required more of that legacy infrastructure, whereas now, you know, with some of the work that Nutanix has done, we actually can successfully virtualize or successfully move any application into this simplified infrastructure, this cloud-like infrastructure, and it can be managed, you know, in a holistic way. And even if we're leveraging public cloud resources, we still have that consistent control plane, you know, across the board. Yeah, Mike, absolutely. At the Nutanix.next show in New Orleans, just about a month ago, there was still some of the messaging, it's about enterprise cloud. It's that operating model that spans between, you know, my private data center and the public cloud. How are customers viewing cloud these days? I say, you know, the journey to cloud reminds me a lot of the journey to virtualization that we had, but there is, you know, maybe even a little bit more discussion of applications, cloud native apps, you know, am I lifting and shifting, am I refactoring, how am I doing that? So, you know, here in England, what's cloud mean to them? Yeah, and again, I think it depends on who you're speaking with. Some organizations are all in with, you know, with cloud, right, and there is a bit of a reeducation where, you know, a cloud is, again, it's an operating model, right? It's not a destination, and we'll continue to say that. And that's going to continue to be the case, right? Our view is, you know, regardless of your applications, all those applications belong within that cloud operating model, but do they belong in the public cloud? And again, our perspective is, there are certainly applications that do, that can be cost effective in the public cloud, just as Rick mentioned in his keynote. Some applications are actually more cost effective, but the majority of our legacy traditional applications that are running our businesses today, actually are more cost effective to run within, you know, your on-premises data center. And the cloud operating model really enables you to manage everything in a consistent way, where regardless of, you know, where that application resides, whether it's in the public cloud, or whether it's in your on-premises data center, you're going to get that same control experience, that same management experience, right? And then, you know, if we kind of fast forward things a little bit in terms of where we're going with all this, you know, some of the announcements we recently had at our next show, actually really show that we're blurring the lines even more, right? So it's more about understanding cost of applications. So Beam, and we'll talk about this in my session a little bit later today, Beam is actually a product set of Nutanix. It's our first software as a service offering that actually will quantify and look at cost in the public cloud. And then the goal of that is to make true comparison as to what it would look like on-premises, right? And be able to make that transition potentially dynamically without any disruption to the actual application. Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, when I talk to customers, Mike, they, you know, IT is heterogeneous. It's always additive. Seems like nothing ever dies. And therefore, in this ever-changing growing and even more complex world, how do I get my arms around that? So, you know, definitely something we heard, Nutanix with Beam and the like. What other technologies, you know, what's interesting you? What things that Nutanix is doing that you want to help educate us? Yeah, so we're doing a lot of interesting things. And again, you know, an important point I want to make is we're not losing focus on our core. You know, when we first, you know, released our platform back in 2011, we built that platform to be scalable and extensible, right? So what we've really done is we've continued to enhance the platform, truly develop the enterprise cloud operating system. And what that means is we can manage our on-premises resources in much the same ways. We can manage those public cloud resources, again, with that consistent experience and control plan. So some of the things that we announced at dot-next, and including Beam, which again, is all about costing and compliance in your public cloud, you know, across public clouds, and again, on-premises in the future, we also have another technology called NetSill, right? And NetSill actually allows us to understand application patterns and behavior regardless of where those applications reside, right? And taking all that and being able to kind of create these bubbles of platforms and have mobility of those platforms across both your on-premises and your public cloud infrastructure, again, regardless of what public cloud provider you're actually using. So those are two things. And then the third big announcement was we call Nutanix Error. And what error is it say? It's a database as a service. It's our first platform as a service offering, native offering from Nutanix. So database as a service, but now having the ability to take enterprise databases that you're running either in Oracle or Postgres today, SQL in the near future, and being able to deploy those in a very simple way, you know, and have a repeatable process to be able to deploy them, and also have the ability to clone and provision in other locations, right? So if I have a large production database that I actually want to provision or that my QA department needs to actually do some analysis on it, I can do that very easily with the error product. A lot of excitement, a lot of buzz around that and really adding a level of simplicity to databases that's just not existed before. Yeah, database definitely a very hot space. We've been covering a lot of the, you know, modernization and open source databases going on that. Last thing I want to ask you on that is, I was talking to a CEO recently and he said, you know, if I'm a five to 10 year old company, it's really easy. I'm not choosing one of the old databases or old applications. I'm going to do something more modern. I'm going to, you know, using all the cool new tools like, I don't know, HubSpot to be able to leverage there. If I'm an older company, I've got some of the technical debt. It's tougher for me to make changes. What do you hear from customers as they kind of look at their application portfolio? What's moving fast and what is taking a little bit longer? I mean, I think everybody has digital transformation top of mind and we do need to kind of rewrite those, or customers know they need to rewrite their legacy applications. Well, the good news is, during the time it takes to do that, we can still offer customers a good solution. So, you know, I think it's a breath of fresh air knowing that I don't need to, you know, go all in with cloud. I can kind of start small, start where it makes sense and then start to kind of evolve my operation and my infrastructure. I can do that in a cost-effective way. The beauty of, you know, the Nutanix platform is we can run our mode one, traditional legacy applications in our mode two applications in the same environment. So, if I want to leverage, you know, if I want to start rewriting or re-architecting those applications, I can do it on premises where I'm not going to have to worry about the cost, right? It's going to be cost-effective. It's in my own data center. And then when it makes sense, potentially move those to the public cloud and again, do that in a very seamless way. All right, well, Mike Bertheum, pleasure to see you as always. Yeah, nice to see you as well. Make sure to check out thecube.net where if you, on the top, hit the search, search for Nutanix. You'll not only find the hundreds of videos that we've done with Nutanix, their customers and the partners, all of the events that we've done in the past. So, make sure to check out all the website material and thanks so much for watching The Cube.