 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage. We had Michael Dell on this morning. We had Pat Gelsinger on this afternoon, and happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Keith Moran, who's a vice president with Nutanix. Keith, I've talked to you lots about theCUBE. You've watched theCUBE. First time on theCUBE, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a great show. All right, so, yeah, let's set the stage here. We're here in Vegas. It's my ninth year doing VMworld. How many of these have you done? So this is my fourth. Yeah? How's the energy of the show, the expo halls, hoppin', you guys, have a nice booth? What are you hearing from the customers here? So I think that we're seeing just a lot of discussion around where the market's going with hybrid cloud. I think that it's a massive opportunity. I think people are trying to connect the dots on where it's going in the next five years. So the vibe's extremely strong right now. All right, so I've met you at some of the Nutanix shows in the past and seen you at some of these, but tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been there, where you came before. Yeah, so I run the Central US for Nutanix and I spent a long time in the Converge, whether it was at NetApp and EMC, threw a few startups, and then I've been at Nutanix for four years and it's been a great ride seeing how the market's opting to hyper-converge that the core problem and vision that D-Raj saw nine years ago is playing out. He's five chess moves ahead of everyone and I think there's, again, a massive opportunity as we move forward. Yeah, Keith, I'd love you to share. I love people in the field. You're talking to customers every day. You hear their mindset. I think back over the last 15 years in my career and when Blade Server first came out or when we started building Converge solutions, it was like, oh wait, getting the organization together, sorting out the budgets. There were so many hurdles because this was the way we did things and this is the way we're organized and this is the way the budgets go. And I think we've worked through a number of those but I'd love to hear from you where we are with both customers, how many of them are on board and doing more things, modernizing and making changes and being more flexible. Yeah, so I think you're spot on in the sense that the silos was the enemy in the sense that people were doing business as usual and that there was process and they didn't want to take risks but I think that the wave of disruption has been so strong and that we're in this period of mass extinction where customers, they don't have choice anymore. That they have to protect against the competitive threat or exploit opportunity and I think the speed and agility with hyperconverge is and what the market disruption is forcing them to make those changes and forcing them to innovate at the end of the day that's their core revenue stream is how do they experiment, how do they innovate and again you're seeing the disruptions coming so fast that people aren't changing, they're to survive. Yeah, we have some interesting paradoxes in the industry. We're talking about things like hyperconverged yet really what we're trying to do is build distributed architectures. We're talking about oh well I want simplicity and I want to get rid of the silos but now I've got multi-cloud environments where I've got lots of different SaaS pieces, I've got multiple public clouds, I often have multiple vendors in my public cloud and I've recreated silos and certifications and expertise. How do customers deal with that? How do you help and your team help educate and get them up so that hopefully the new modern era is a little bit better than what they were dealing with. Yeah and I think that's part of where the opportunity is. I think that the private cloud people don't do public well and I don't think the public cloud vendors do private well so that's why the opportunity is so big and I think for us we're going to continue to harden the IS stack of what we built and then our vision is how do we build a control plane for the next generation. If you look at our acquisition strategy and where we're putting in it, how do you have a single operating system that spans the user experience from the public to private and make it an exact replica and again I think customers are struggling with this problem and that as apps scale up and scale down and the demand for them that they want this ability to course correct and be able to move VMs and containers in a very seamless fashion from one app to the next and adjust for the business market conditions. Yeah I had a comment actually but one of my guests this week is we now have pervasive multi-cloud. We spent a few years sorting out like well who are the public clouds going to be and there's still moves and changes but we know there's a handful of the real big guys then there's the next tier of all the server providers and the software players like Nutanix is well look you're not trying to become a competitor at Amazon or Google, you're partners, I see Nutanix at those shows. So maybe explain what's the long-term strategy, how does Nutanix as you've been talking about enterprise cloud for a number of years but what's that long-term vision as to how Nutanix plays in this ecosystem? Yeah so you know for us I think there's part of it is our own cloud which is I and it's living in this multi-cloud world where a customer can do DR as a service with that single operating system moving it from a Nutanix on-prem solution, moving it to a Nutanix cloud, moving it to Azure, moving it up to GCP or moving it to AWS and they have to do with thought because clearly there's so many interdependencies with these apps, there's governance, there's laws of the land, there's physics, there's so many things that are going to make this a complex equation for customers but again they're demanding it and that's forcing the issue where customers have to make these decisions. Yeah Keith I want to hear when you talk to your customers where are they with their cloud strategy and you know the number I heard at one conference was like oh 85% of customers have a cloud strategy and I kind of put tongue in cheek, I said well 15% of the people got to figure something out and the other 85 but when you talk to them next quarter the strategy probably has changed quite a bit because things are changing ras and you need to be agile and be able to change and adjust with what's going on so where do your customers, I'm sure it's a big spectrum. It is, you know the interesting thing for me for cloud is on average we're seeing that utilization rate specifically in AWS is somewhere in the 25% rate for reserved insurance was very surprising to me because the whole point of cloud is to test it, to deploy it and to scale up and if you're running in an environment with a utilization rate that the economics aren't working so I think that people are starting to look at all right what are the economics behind the app? Does it make sense in the cloud? Does it make sense on prem? Again what are the interdependencies of it and they're looking at the classic problems they're having are still around, they're spending 80% of their time just managing firmware and drivers and spending thousands of hours per quarter just troubleshooting and not impacting the business so I think fundamentally that's what the customers are trying to solve is how do we get out of this business of spending all our time keeping the lights on and how do we drive innovation and that ratio has been historically for 20 years and I think again Nutanix helps drive that in the sense that we're helping customers shift that ratio and that pain they have I always say put your smartest people on your hardest problems and when you've got these high-end sand administrators spending a lot of time they should be working on automation, orchestration, repeatable process that gives scale and again impacts the business. Yeah a line that I used at your most recent Nutanix show is talking to customers step one was modernize the platform step two they could modernize the application. Absolutely. Maybe speak a little bit to that cause in this environment we know the journey we went through to virtualize a lot of applications. I talked to a Nutanix customer this morning and talked about deploying Oracle and I said tell me how that was because how many years did we spend fighting as customers, you want to virtualize Oracle and Oracle would be like no, no, no you have to use OVM, you have to use Oracle Liz, you have to use Oracle that, we've gone through that and is it certified on Nutanix? It's good to go, it's ready to go he's like it was pretty easy and I'm like it's so refreshing to see that but when you talk about new modern applications and customers have this whole journey to embrace things like Agile and CI CD and the like where does Nutanix play in this and how are you helping? Yeah so I mean I think on the first when you look at the classic database so things like SQL we're automating so that you can extract it in a very simple manner you look at the mode two apps like Kubernetes we're taking a 37 page deployment guide and automating it down into three clicks because customers want the speed, they want the deployment cycles, they want the automation associated with that and it's having a big impact in the sense that these customers are trying to figure out all right where am I going here in the next three years and it's for us we're seeing massive workloads whether it's Oracle, SQL, people deploying on it and again there's so much pressure for people to change and constantly disrupt themselves and that's what we're seeing and later that all on top of a lot of legacy apps so we've got oil and gas customers and big retailers and when they show us the dependency maps of their applications it's incredible of how complex these are and they want simplicity and speed and how do they get out of that business of the tangled mess. Yeah Keith I wonder if you have an example and you might not be able to use an exact customer but you mentioned some industries so here's something I hear at a show like this. All right I understand my virtualized environment I've deployed HCI, I really need to start extending and using public cloud, what are some first steps that you've seen customers as to how they're making that successful what are some of those important patterns what works and where's good places for them to start. Yeah and I look at it almost when I see some of the automation deployment cycles they have of how they get a VM through the full life cycle and behind the scenes they have such massive complexities that it's hindering their ability to create automation. So the first layer is how do you simplify the infrastructure underneath and it goes back to that dependency map so again oil and gas it's big retailers when they show us what their infrastructure is they want to simplify that layer first and then from there they can build incredible automation that gives them a multiple in the return that is much greater than what they're seeing in today's infrastructure. Okay Keith what's exciting you in the marketplace today you get to meet with a lot of customers you know just kind of an open-ended. Yeah so for me it's I've worked in a lot of big legacy companies and I've never seen customers that have the passion towards Nutanix and I think that it's the problems that we're solving for them the impacts we're having on the business is driving that loyal following but again how fast people are either trying to exploit a competitive advantage or protect against the threat that it's interesting to be right in the epicenter of this big shift that's happening right this tectonic plates are shifting in that you've got a massive cloud provider like AWS you've got a big player like VMware what's the next generation going to look like and for me it's fascinating to see how these businesses are competing and you know I look at a customer I've got a Fortune 500 and the CTO's comment to me was I'm one app away from disruption so they're a massive commercial real estate organization and he's terrified of what could happen next and he's got to stay way ahead of the curve and I think that the innovation rate that we're bringing, the support, the infrastructure I think it's a great place because of how we're serving what we call the underserved customer and having a big impact. Yeah it's interesting we always poke at the how much are customers just dreading that potential disruption and how much are they excited about what they can do different. You know you talk about working with traditional vendors in IT for the last decade or so it's like well IT and the business we're kind of fighting over it there's a line one of our hosts here Alan Cohen used to use actually the first time I heard it was at the Nutanix show in Miami when we had it on and he said there's this triangle and where you want to get people is away from the no and the slow and get them to go so you know do you think more people are fearful or more people are excited? Is it a mix of you know that goes for your customers? And again I think that the market forces are really helping because people they have to shift to stay competitive and that they're pushing every day to the level of change and how people are embracing change is much faster than it was because again these disruption cycles are much faster and they're coming at customers in a totally different way that they weren't prepared for. All right Keith final word from you is how many Cube interviews have you watched you know in the last bunch of years? I mean it's off the charts. Hundreds and hundreds of hours I would say. Well hey really appreciate you joining us keep more and not only a long time watcher but now a Cube alumni with a thousand that we've done so pleasure to talk with you on camera as well as always off camera so great stuff. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from BMworld 2018 I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching the Cube.