 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England where 3,500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days of wall-to-wall exclusive coverage from theCUBE is Youp Piscar, our first European co-host. I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was a niece, we're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but you're a host. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you. So it was awesome, three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well. So getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. Yeah, well you really appreciate you joining us, give us first of all some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint, so you've been a customer, you're part of the, I believe it's the NTC program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology, we're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like. So looking forward to having you sit with me and dig into it, including first on theCUBE, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. Yes, oh yeah, it's going to be completely in Netherlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. All right, so D'Rodge Pandy was on stage this morning, and D'Rodge, masterful, it gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says, still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware, back when they were about 100 people, Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people, Pernix data that Nutanix bought, Sochum, who we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog. And Nutanix now, over I think 3,000, 3,500 people announced last night their Q1 2019 earnings, and just some of the quick speeds and feeds, $313 million of revenue, that is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3%, quarter over quarter from the previous quarter, strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software and expect to reach somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters. So aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say, well, this Nutanix has a $7 billion market cap before the market opens today, we'll see what the market thinks of their earnings, but what's just at a high level, you, as I said, you've been watching Nutanix for a while also, what should take on the company? So I met them a couple of years ago as well, like I think they were 100 people big back then, I learned from them in, from a technology perspective. So I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building this startup, building this technology. And this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware, it was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out and building it out and building it out. So at some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were trying. So ease of management, one click for everything. And that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly has been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. Yeah, well that's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for theCUBE is at Amazon re-invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering. But we're going to talk here about Nutanix actually, the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said, they started out, really you think of that thin layer to really simplify IT. Dear Raj and the keynote talked about we want to achieve invisible together with the line that he used and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyper-converged infrastructure in my mind when I talked to users why they bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was oh, I'm going to consolidate, I'm going to get higher utilization, and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyper-converge is if you look at building it one way versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways, I say IT can now say yes to the business and focus on things that add value to the business, move up the stack. A line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is first, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that. So it was a nice catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? Yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure layer five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. And it's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff, just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need it to spend a lot of time on it. And now it's really so easy. It's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever. And that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value-add stuff on top of it. And I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company, I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. So I think we're going to hear a lot more about the hybrid strategy about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that instead of just the infrastructure stuff. Yeah, you bring a good point that that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about. And let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first we have core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about. It's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use. It's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that core piece. Then we add on top of that is essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched, as an announcement about two years ago, I believe it was, that they have blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there. And there's Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the core. And then they have Enterprise, which is ZyCloud's kind of the branding that they have along these. But Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say that it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look at it from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have. It's the, I'm buying core stuff. I'm probably growing to essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense, and it's likely going to be a different go-to-market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself. It was born in the cloud, and many of the Enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're kind of splitting up and discussing the portfolio? So just like you said, it took me a while to figure out what that whole portfolio was, the core essentials, Enterprise stuff. But I do think, looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense, right? So they started out simplifying the core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, that's easy to use, easy to expand upon. So I do see essentials as a good expansion of that messaging they have been giving for quite a number of years already, simplifying what is in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hybrid cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example, that's still difficult, right? Standing up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes it so much easier. So I do agree with the segmentation into the three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. All right, so you brought up a term hybrid cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning, as an area I want to kind of poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talking to one customer in prep for this, and he said, you know, a year ago, in the last couple of times, but hearing a lot about Google, and you know, had Diane Greene on the stage at the, I believe it was the DC show, I didn't see Google here, I know there is updates as to where the Google relationship are going. They did mention Kubernetes, the Kubernetes offering that Nutanix has is called Carbon. I actually expect to see, not only will we have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show KubeCon in Seattle in two weeks, you know, Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. But other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to how Nutanix does hybrid. They talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments and many of their products live in multi-cloud. And there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a, you know, nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native in Kubernetes. They bought FDO. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. But Nutanix is messaging, you know, when I had, we're going to have Dira John today. He says, you know, Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press. Once again, not a lot of companies using it yet. And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand, how do I get from where I am today to where I need to go? And of course, I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. You know, the hybrid multi-cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five to 10 years at least. And Edge puts a whole another, you know, spin on things. But yeah, what do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, you know, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is they think what they want clarity on. Yeah, I agree. So, you know, I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid. They're calling it hyperconverged cloud, you know, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think that Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid cloud story, you know, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think, you know, Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves. But you're already seeing, you know, the small acquisitions they're doing or the small steps they're taking. Like, you know, acquiring frame is one of those, you know, unexpected things for me, right? I would never have thought Nutanix would, you know, go that direction. So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, their story isn't complete yet. It's not a story that customers can buy into fully just now. So they do still need a little bit of time for that. Yeah, well, you really appreciate you helping us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage, so much to go in. And you said, right, M&A in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy. You know, heck, one of the underwriting rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is, you know, will someone take Nutanix off the table? Not something I expect them to, you know, specifically direct, but at a $7 billion market, that would be a large acquisition. But we have seen a few of those in the last couple of years. So for you, Piskar, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us for two days, wall-to-wall coverage. Thecube.net, as course is where to see all of the live and on-demand content. Thanks so much for watching The Cube.