 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering dot next conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to D.C., everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix, next conf. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, right? Running startups, eating glass, as we call it. So when we first heard about Plexi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strata that time. It was kind of heavy and a lot really geeky. I'm not a networking guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexi. Yeah, I know, again, thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. We're actually breaking out, right? And so it's great to see the momentum and the team's done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is you have a technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, tremendous revenue growth this year. We could probably be profitable if we want to be this year, which there's not many startups that can say that. And but what's happened is fundamentally we've really connected now what we have built our technology to the pain points in the marketplace and we have deep, deep clarity and understanding of that now. So talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company, kind of why you joined, what you're all about. Yeah, so we're building next generation networks. We're not building traditional networks and so we're very focused on the next year of computing. Third platform and scaled out infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. The choice the public thought is there, it's going to be there forever. But how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And what we've realized and Dave realized this early on is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years. There's an emergence of this other data center network. Cisco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data center networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now, we call it by a name, which is the hyperconverged network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Flexi? Flexi builds the HCN for the HCI infrastructure. Okay, Rich, you're going to have to unpack this little bit. So people in the networking world, we said, we understand that it was a lot of the east-west traffic, the traffic between nodes, but architecturally, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes. So where was the gap that you're looking to fill and does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? Those are all great questions and are very relevant to the challenge. So when you really look at the problems we saw, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second, and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And we've built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure, everything from the applications, to the operating environments, to the compute, to the storage, and to the network. And so what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure. And we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software-definable network that's built out of industry-standard components. So Plexi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storage and compute things together. And we do that on white box switches. And that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy. But on top of that, we've built our software abstractions. And it really is, the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software control allows you to provision this network seamlessly. In the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. So when Nutanix first started, they were like, we're going to kill that sand because you don't need some of that complexity. So when do I need this fabric, as you call it, as that interconnected tissue? What size customer, what kind of challenges does that really knock down? So if you're living within a rack, you don't have any of these problems really, right? I mean, our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack, we dramatically simplify your network provisioning. So even within a rack, our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling because we make the network invisible in that context. So as you provision your VMs or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to a second, third, or more racks. So some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, 10 racks and 10 rows, thousands of servers, but we can start as small as one or two switches. And so the value proposition really is how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure? In other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And that's exactly what we do. So you have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out. And it's really simple. You got the old way, which is storage, server, and networking, all that complexity. Nutanix really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right? So what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? So if you look at the three tiered architecture, as you talked about, there were actually multiple networks. And the first thing anyone does when they deploy converged infrastructure, or hyperconverged in particular, is they eliminate the SAT. So that was another network. We just never really thought about it that way. And so effectively, what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a sand on your network. So for a storage guy, notions of five-way channel zoning are inherent now in our IP-oriented network. But our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So as you scale, your latency is constant. As you add things like NVMe, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi-tiered network. So you don't have the complexity of building a multi-tiered network. As you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconverged is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem, you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. That becomes your new bottleneck. It's your new bottleneck for performance, but really for administration. And so our integration layer ties into Nutanix. It makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment. It's file system. When nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing snaps or backups, et cetera, and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. We do the same thing for VMware. And when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that the Nutanix, the software between nodes, is also things like AHV? Correct. So AHV or VMware and Prism. So our management console can be launched from Prism now. So you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexi's management domain. But more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on a network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. So explain how this is different than just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? So for one thing, we're only the network, right? And so the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage, we don't compute. And so we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage, as opposed to a data center network where you connect your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Cisco, if you will, network. Where this embedded network in these hyper-converged solutions put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure, you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And it's so well integrated into our net and Nutanix, you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. Sorry, Stu, from a buyer standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network? Or do I have to, you know, throw that out and bring this in? So we're totally compatible with existing networks. So what you do is you do two or three things. We can exert into existing networks without modify them. But you don't need to keep adding top-rack switches and spines to your existing network because most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guys, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix network or the Nutanix fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So most of the traffic between Nutanix nodes goes on that network, which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network, which just frankly removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. In the same way, the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. Shouldn't have to worry about this other traffic. So Rich, it's interesting. Talk to new Nutanix customers. You're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues. Some larger customers, it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVMe over fabric. So what does that mean for Nutanix standalone? And I got to think that that's a huge tide to bring you into a lot of accounts. I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean, we were all involved in the early days of flash and we saw that coming when we were DMC. You know, I probably sold more flash to anybody in the world actually in terms of petabytes actually. And NVMe is that next wave, right? So whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, it's going to elevate this east, west, this need for this other network. And to pitch plexi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency. So we're actually awaiting the day that NVMe hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network. Every hierarchical network will be just blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi-tiered network are just clear. You can measure it. So we're doing a lot of stuff. Your solution's ready for this today. We're ready for today. And when you simplify the network like the entire infrastructure and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes. And everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they're going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure into some of these more exciting areas. We just heard that from two CIOs. No, I mean, we see this a lot. I mean, Telecom Italia's here with us, Sparkle, one of our barrier customers. We have a session this afternoon at three o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us. And I just spent a good hour with them here. And it's all about the operating expense. It's like Nutanix plus Plexi reduces my operating expense. And he's going to repeatedly say that. And it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI. They can't afford to build those programmers. Our integration layer makes that seamless. It takes it away. So what's your relationship? What's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? So right now, we have a number of large scale service provider customers as we sell through distribution of the partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with some Plippity, but we're going to go after all of the ACI vendors ultimately, but pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader. And we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field in parallel. We've been recruiting Nutanix partners. Ours are master distributors, so we're recruiting our partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announced a reference architecture this week with Nutanix. So we're very focused on Nutanix to clearly the leader in the space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not invoked to be profitable rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. And this time is different. So timing is different. I think it actually, I think it plays to our strength that, you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some, about 80% of all that we spent has been in R&D. And that's not, that's not common. Most startups in our stage have invested a lot more in the go to market. And now's our time to go do that. But we have, now we have the advantage that we have some tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves. And the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different. And I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. Great, well Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching and really wish you the best. Pleasure. Thank you. All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Nutanix. Next Conf, right back.