 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of theCUBE. Happy to be at the inaugural European conference here for Nutanix's .next show here in Vienna, Austria. And welcome for the last segment of the interviews that we're doing is Chris Kaderis, who is the vice president of AMIA for Nutanix. Chris, you've been with the company about three weeks, and a big show here in your home turf, so thanks for joining us. Thank you, thank you for having me. All right, so Chris, give us a little bit, your background and what brought you over to Nutanix? Sure, yeah, I've been in, let's call it the infrastructure technology industry for about 24 years. Background as I started with a company that no longer exists called CableTron Systems, so those of you from long ago will remember CableTron. Yeah, I'm a networking guy by background, and CableTron, Day Networks, all those ones. The Route 128 technology cordon that had a lot of these companies. Yeah, great company, spent about seven and a half to eight years there up in New Hampshire at their corporate headquarters, and then went down to New York City and worked for them for a while. Then I left the company, I went to Smart, which is if you know the IP space. Yeah, I actually went to EMC before they acquired Smart, so I went to EMC back in 2002. I was at EMC for about 15 and a half years, spent about half of that in the US, running sales for half of the country for the commercial division, and then was moved over to the UK to be effectively the COO for the AMIA business. Well, that was about seven years ago, so I've been here for about seven years. Chris, I commiserate with you. I think any of us that have been in the IT industry for long enough, you look back on your resume, and I look on LinkedIn, and the companies are either gone, have been acquired, or they're not the name. You and I both worked at a company that was called EMC, and LinkedIn says I worked for Dell EMC, and I left six years ago, so I never worked for Dell EMC. Yeah, I actually worked there for two days, so that's okay, but it was a great company, and it is a great company, and will be a great company in the future, but I've made a different decision to move on in my career, and they're a great partner of ours as well, so I think this company has incredible potential. I think a lot of people see that. I think we're addressing to the heart of the need, of what customers need in their infrastructures today, and when I looked in the industry, I started looking a few years ago, just like most people, because the industry had transitioned, technology was transitioning at such pace, so you look up and you say, where do you go to be influential to customers, to help customers do what they need to do, and do you go to a service provider, do you go to Amazon, what are the companies that are relevant today? And at first, I didn't even think of Nutanix, right? I had figured that they were just an appliance company, HCI, that's all that I thought about, until it was lucky enough to have some conversations with their executives and truly understood what they were trying to accomplish, and then that opened up a whole new world, so I'm looking forward to the next part of my career at Nutanix. So I had an interview with D. Roger earlier in the show, and said, as the company matures, obviously globalization is one of the key things said today, it's only about 35% is non-US of sales, so obviously there's plenty room for growth. How do you see, how do we measure kind of your success going forward, Chris? Yeah, well I think growth is one number for sure, right? So the more customers that we delight and we please, that are off we're going to be, I think that's our primary, we need to stay on that as a primary focus, so it just happens to be that those numbers are counted, right, by how many customers and what revenue and what earnings that we have in the industry, but if we focus just on continually to delight customers to sign up new customers in the business, that's usually what we need to look at. I think, additionally, I will throw the human element to this, we need to create an organization that we're proud of. An organization that serves our communities. What I've learned in many years, and especially the last seven that I've been in Amia, is that people want to work for a company that they're proud of and they want to be able to affect change in their communities and with their customers, and if we do a good job of keeping that in line, I think we'll see success. You look at kind of your current customer base and the potential customer base and how you go to market, maybe could you break us down a little bit, talking specifically, there's kind of small, medium-sized customers, there's enterprise customers, there's service providers, you've got the channel that gets involved in various pieces. How's the go-to-market work in Europe? Sure, so we're a 100% channel go-to-market in Europe and worldwide as a company. The interesting thing is we don't have unlimited resources like most companies. Even at EMC, we didn't have unlimited resources and you can't address the whole market. It's very difficult to do that and be productive. So we're going to go after the segment of the market as a go-to-market strategy that's going to provide us with the most productivity, right? Typically, that's with customers on the higher end of the pyramid. We also will have a strategy and our establishing strategies as to how do we go after the SMB space, but we have to leverage that well. We have to make sure that we measure there's a high touch and there's a low touch model and we will put those structures in place to make sure that we can serve our SMB customers with our express products and that we'll make sure that we have a higher touch model within the upper end of the pyramid. In regards to service providers, we see that as an emerging market for us. The thing is a lot of the service providers have built out their control layer already, right? So they've, for the most part, homegrown it or they use VMware, they've built that out. So it's very difficult to unseat a control layer because they've spent a lot of time customizing it to their billing applications. So we do see a huge opportunity and those service providers that are starting up new, which there still are plenty of, and those service providers that are standing up new use cases in their business. And that we see as a significant market. So we're verticalizing in those markets that are heavy service provider oriented and we'll provide some vertical sales teams to make sure that we can bring the best possible options for our customers. Yeah, absolutely. I had the opportunity to speak with two of your, Amia service provider customers. One was a heavy VMware shop, but had great use for what you're doing. Speak to the vision as talked about in the keynote says, Nutanix is more of a platform which kind of fits into kind of enterprise cloud messaging because I think to your point, most people still think of HCI equals box and needs to be much beyond a box or just storage for it to be interesting in the market today. Yeah, yeah, we're definitely seeing that, right? We're seeing that customers need to evolve as they handle the needs of their business users and clients. They have challenges, they're looking for answers. And I think some of the messages that we've talked about in this conference in the last couple of days around that we see Nutanix as the AWS for the enterprise. And I think that kind of nails it home for a lot of customers. They understand the ease of use and the flexibility of an AWS environment, but they want some control. They want some control on cost and they want some control in their environment. However they define control, every customer is going to define it slightly differently depending on what market they're in. So that we think is going to resonate well with customers and hopefully provide some solutions for them. Yeah, the thing I'll poke at at that is talking to one of your service providers, if you talk about the utilization of resources in any enterprise, it is way under what you would do the public cloud and still way under what any service provider would do. So that's why I get excited when I talk to these service providers that are like, oh yeah, I'm getting 70 to 80% utilization because a typical virtualized customer, more than the 15% and even the really big guys that are good at this, they're not getting anywhere near that kind of 70 to 80% utilization. Yeah, and that's the whole consumption gap issue that the industry has. And we don't have the answer to everything, but I think we have a considerable piece of the answer to that where customers can look at maximizing the consumption of what they buy. And one of the things that most customers have been asking for, including service providers, is they pay as you grow model. And just the architecture that's been built here facilitates that pay as you grow model. So where everybody in the industry who's building traditional architectures has to come up with some fancy commercial schemes as to how to do that, some how you buy and how you meter, the underlying architecture is built that way. So that's something that I think will help customers out. So Chris, what about hiring? And I talked to a number of the customers here, they're really impressed with the quality of the people here. The concern of course is they say, when you go in a region and you have five people, it's easy to get really high quality people. When you need to scale that to 500 people, it's tough to get the same quality. And talk to Dheeraj a little bit about some of that paradox of growth. But what do you see as kind of the growth plan from a personnel standpoint? So it's going to be significant, right? We're growing, as we speak, I've been on for three weeks and we've hired a lot of people, right? So just getting controls and monitors around that is going to be real strategic to us to make sure we get the right people culturally and the right people who have the skills that we need to serve our customers appropriately. So that is my number one objective, right? There's a lot of things that I want to do underneath that, talent piece. But if you get the talent piece correct, everything seems to take care of itself, right? If you get the right culture that has the right experience, then you don't have to put a lot of controls in underneath that. So we'll be spending a lot of time on that. I think the key is, is that we make sure that the people who talk to our customers really understand value and understand what the customer's business is. And if we can find people from the part of the industry that does that, then we'll be okay. Chris, I'm curious, what's your take on just kind of the economic situation, especially here in Amia? You go in the US, they kind of think of, it's just the rest of the world. You come here to Europe, it's very understand that the German economy, there's certain things that they want to control and understand the way they do this. The UK, of course, has Brexit. Talk to the Africans, it's obviously very nuanced and not homogeneous. So how do you deal with that from a sales standpoint? Yeah, I think, you know, what I've seen is that the market is endless for us. Economic conditions don't particularly have an effect because we're such in a situation where a smaller company and there's a lot of market and a lot of runway to go. So I don't see it as a major concern. Currency's devaluation sometimes hurts, right? So because it hurts not only us and how we realize our revenues and our earnings, but it hurts the customer, right? Because customer has to traditionally sometimes pay more for something that they would get cheaper to be based on currency fluctuation. So I think that's a real pain. If you go to places like Russia, you go to places like the Nordics, you go to South Africa, you see these huge fluctuations in currency. So that to us definitely affects markets, but right now we're just at the tip of the iceberg in regards to addressing the marketplace as to how many customers could use this technology. Do you have any manufacturer facilities in theater? What's the kind of supply chain look like? Yeah, nothing, now I've been on for three weeks. So nothing that I've found yet, right? There could be something here, but not that I've found yet. Obviously for software engineering, which is predominantly what we do, right? Almost entirely. We have engineers that are in the Amia Theater. We have plenty of engineers that are here. And that has become a femoral, as you know, with most organizations, right? You don't need to have a software engineering facility in any particular place. Is there a software development office or is it just kind of disparaging? There are some offices, yeah, there's some offices in the UK, there's some offices, obviously in India, there's offices, large facilities there that do software development. So there's spread out depending on where we find the need. You'll find specific places like Berlin, like St. Petersburg, where you have specific expertise that can help with the product. Chris, I want to give you the final word, been in the job for three weeks, you've got the big European show, a lot of customers, so congratulations. What do you hear from the users? What do you want to take away to be from the event? Sure, the thing that I'm hearing that I think everybody should really double click on is every customer, and this isn't, I know it's hard to take this, but it's not a sales thing. I'm not making a sales pitch. It's amazing, this is a religion. And in order to reach religious type of status, with customers and partners, something has to be going on that's really special. So to me, I feel like it's a whole new world of IT. As I mentioned, I've spent 24 years in traditional IT architectures. So I would tell your listeners and your viewers to double click a bit on Nutanix, understand what we're trying to provide, and give us a call, and I think you'll see that it's a whole new way to do IT. Chris, really appreciate you coming to join, speak to our team, look forward to, you know, any year from now at the European event, we'll have a lot of metrics and things to discuss, and good luck in the keynote. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with my wrap here from the Nutanix.next conference, 2016. You're watching theCUBE.