 from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix.next. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People have been in job for quite a long time. So, Lou Atanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. Like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. It's my pleasure, actually. For our audience, give us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Nutanix, you know, the new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. You'd be able to history, started out actually at IBM, the Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span, it was everything from research to a systems engineer to in sales for a long time, had many positions. It was there for 38 years at IBM. So it was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business. And I also had mainframe software reporting into me and it was a great team. Then, you know, it's time. You know, it was some things that, you know, we just wanted to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company in an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. And quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. I could probably tell I'm not a job hopper. And an opportunity came about and I'll answer your second question is, you know, why Nutanix? Someone reached out and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company want to just have a conversation with you. And frankly, I said, no. And I have to be real honest with you. Dear Raj is pretty persistent. And we had a meeting, it was on a Sunday. And we spent four hours together. And it was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and a half hours talking about family. And but it wasn't just your biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family. And then that wasn't enough. Then he talked about his clients and how they were family. And once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to that really cared about its people that great products don't make great companies. Great people make great companies. And it was instantaneous. I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dear Raj was very special. And that's the reason why I came. Yeah. I think back to Dear Raj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami. I've been at all five of the Nutanix.next events. And they got up on stage and I spent time I think he told it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers of course, very important. And he said, you know, in not too distant future, I'll have a new constituency kind of alluding to going public eventually. And of course we're there. So as chief revenue officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with? And where are you going to? It really would be all. Listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. And I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past. And so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which is growth is going is solid. You need a good foundation. So that's what I'm going to be first focusing on. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion. And I've told my team this is that, I'm not coming in here and say, oh, we got to change everything. They're doing pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that. And that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and getting to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably most important is I've been listening to clients. And I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. And it's surprised me and I shouldn't have been surprised in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, they're expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Diraj on theCUBE, talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software-only company? So if hypothetically that happens, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales? I mean, it has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah, but I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed, from a hardware company to a services company, and then a software company, now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this being, as it's coming into more of a software business, is that now we can give our clients choice. Like, clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way, and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're giving them choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware, if a company is already invested in a company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins, and I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole. And I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was, couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales, direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? So one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through a partner, so there's no real channel conflict, and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on, and the amount of reps and technical teams, and everyone they've hired over the last couple of years, I'll tell you what, in my first five days here, I could tell you they've done a really, really good job. I had so up to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, right? And one of the key things is going to be enablement, right? We've got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it, it's average is no longer good enough, right? We can't be average. Not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side and the channel side and the sales side and the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredibly good base that I have to work off of because a lot of them are already here. Yeah, and I think about kind of the slice of money. There's the partners on the technology side. You've got the OEMs, you've got, you know, pretty large ecosystem of software partners and helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at keeping growing that and keeping all those various constituencies? The interesting thing is for any company and for anyone that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. There's no matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach and more importantly, the relationships to some of these partners I've had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' solutions and problems. So I think we're well positioned and I want to use all the different routes to market no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas and also I don't believe in a, you know, we're a US based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it and go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doing it. I like to listen because things that are done in Europe and Amia are going to be very different than what we do in AP and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business especially I think dealing with certain partners if you kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those? Well that's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELA's, you know, ELA's is a, I always say it's a drug very, it's a drug that's tough to get off of because you can have one really big quarter because you did a couple of ELA's and then others. I have to admit this company's not on a, you know, not been doing it. Our whole premises starts small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies it's, we're going to get you and do a big ELA and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties would be so high. And then you have a customer who frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them wanting our products and grow small and then grow big. So I think right now any company by the way will have some lumps here and there and we'll get a big deal now and then sometimes it's tough but the growth that they're on, I anticipate being a little less of that and my view is, is, you know, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we have, we're positioned to do that. Yeah, any commentary on kind of did just global economic conditions, you know, how that plays into things. You know, I've had many conversations with Dear Raj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it. And he's like, well, we're going to go out, you know. So, and the long run, it doesn't matter really whether it was, you know, a down month or quarter, you know, up or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days. So how does that impact your testing? Yeah, but I, you know, there's always uncertainties. I think, you know, the interesting part is we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy is down, I think there's some of the solutions that we have in some cases provide such great value that they could save money. So I think we're in a much better position in even in a down economy. And so, you know, listen, we've, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when economy's down. So you've got to just keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you keep, you stay to your goal, you keep pushing on the goal, you get great leadership and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. You know, you've been in, I think, learning and listening mode for a lot of it. You know, anything we should be looking for that we should be looking differently from Nutanix, kind of over the next six to 12 months. I would just say this, you know, the best thing I could say is you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. I'm more of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, you know, that that comment of average is no longer good enough. I want, we want to make sure that everything that we do is the very best that. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us. We've got momentum, both on the press, on what our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, you know, before I came here, I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company. So all the way around, I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team. And I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Atanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to catching up with you again, you know, once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. So I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE.