 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of a special announcement brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020, many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, were thinking about where they were going to cloud and of course, it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So one of the front seats of this is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumni. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product with Nutanix and Tarkin Mainer, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many time guests. Previously, Tarkin is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix, Monica and Tarkin. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. Yeah, thank you. All right, so Tarkin, as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIOs specifically and companies overall are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix launching and why it's so important today? So Stu, first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through and obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates, but also creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and commercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries from healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, and Monica knows as well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, Stu, well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid, you know, converged infrastructure story. Now, we're taking that next level via our data center solutions, we are DevOps solutions and user computer solutions now in multi-clad fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix classes product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at seedable executive level supporting this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what they're important, what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. Yeah, and one thing I would add to, you know what Tarkin said Stu is, look, we talk to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're bringing, you know, making really a hybrid cloud or reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring, you know, a true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HCI space and Nutanix specifically was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkin, help us connect, you know, how is Nutanix, you know, going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with the solution? So Stu, you're right on, as far on. You look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about a Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently I was with a senior executive, a senior executive with an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world, in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling talking to not only the CIO, the chief of office on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, look Tarkin in the next 12 months. My business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways. While I'm cutting costs. So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software, the unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end-to-end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers as well as for end user computing individuals to make you sure to take advantage of these VDI that stability service type of capabilities. So in that context, what we're providing now to the CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have workloads on AWS. They have workloads on Azure. They have workloads on Google. They have workloads on France Telecom, the local XP. They have workloads in Germany. They have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for DR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud in simple terms? Can we get some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk through this. We are super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is as we just going to discuss with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more details, but that's really the gist of it, is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skill set. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases, what workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? Sure, and as we talk to customers too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of demand, sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations, they weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, end user computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest in again having on-premises data center assets sitting there idly and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tharkin was talking about, really there are three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix clusters which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on-prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud, do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem, do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. You want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost, simplicity of managing your costs, making sure you know how you're going to incur costs. How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the, we have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place which workload? Which workload goes into public cloud which stays on-premises? We have an amazing tool called Beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. We've talked to so many customers but this isn't a nutshell. The use cases and workloads that we're delivering to customers right out the gate. Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers and I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them and that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now, imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And that big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with now clusters to really expand their VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business, for them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them, they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using our Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as the backbone, Nutanix clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also, by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on. We have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, wait, I now have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour and I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud. You know, our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. Yeah, Tarkin, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix at the re-invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customers' conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you're using these buzzwords. At the end of the day, this is an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, you know, even in this conversation, there's a big pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide the streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data relating those apps mobile and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So look, we're hearing constantly from the enterprises, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly, they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off-prem, and off-prem is going to have tons of different variations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. You know, we provide 20 plus queues to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know, and a lot of those customers, on-prem customers now also come into our own cloud services. With Kolo partners, we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics and service capabilities. If you get a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR, disaster recovery service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's U.S. companies we think U.S. only, but think about this. This is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India, we have customers in Australia as Monica talked about, in China, in Japan, in Germany, and some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, disaster recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and apps to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same canton, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to our customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just so you know, Stu, you're not alone on this. We cannot do this alone. We had tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the announcements from HPE as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end-user computing. We're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security. As slow partners, as you know, we support, you know, VMware, ESXi, we have partners like Red Hat, who's doing tons of work on the Linux front. We partner with IBM, we partner with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers that generate the cut cast in this difficult backdrop, especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. Yeah, let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan, also we have the global SIs of course. You know, the Wipros and HCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zensar, you name it all. We are working with all of them to bring clusters-based solutions to market. And, you know, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yota. So it's a long list of partnerships. You know, one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud, you know, for a little while now and work across multiple clouds. And, you know, it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is it's built in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space. So it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also the customers can use, by the way, the Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS if they choose to. And now, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that BYOL is something that we're very proud of. We're truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched from Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model. And as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here. That correct? Yes, we also offer the pay as ego model. Of course, on cloud this popular, so customers can decide, they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring existing on-prem license to AWS. Or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. Yeah. Well, and Manaka, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here because you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players all talking out there. So architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, you know, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, you know, being having that ego, but really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up our customer's experience to cloud? So building a cloud in an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability, all of that together. You know, I think the way Dheeraj, R-C-U-S-Sum-Z and Tarkan have talked about this is we may not have been the first to market, but we believe you're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as it was Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you, when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? Thank you Stu, that actually is part of the question. You know, most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? Have your multi-cloud. And when you kill the only and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services and you're actually on some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, we don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes on top of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with our enterprise commercial on public sector customers, also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment logistic capabilities, starting with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service, but take that to next level, the database as a service with VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, Rokonovic SoftBank in Japan, Rokonovic OVH in France, and multiple countries that we're building this XSP, Service Rider-Telco relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region, in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue, and obviously third leg of this multi-leg stool is hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug Hume, Matt Garman, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, they've been super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator, and with the typical AWS simplicity, and obviously with the Nutanix simplicity coming together, but given choice to our customers as we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-class strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Road, it's an amazing book, I strongly suggest you all read it, it's all talk about partnerships throughout the history, the, you know, those empires, those countries who've been successful partnered well, connected dots well, so that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connected dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like with Wipro, we already delivered an end user company service called, best of the service virtual desk, database as a service, you know, digital data services with them, we have two other new services starting with HCL and others, so all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, we're going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time, as we move forward with the strategy. All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you're an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect to on-premises if they choose to or just if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really only the beginning for us as Tharkin was saying, you know, our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future in how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation, going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. All right, well, Monica and Tharkin, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning, so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. Thank you so much. Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. All right, for Tharkin and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement.