 from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering .next conference brought to you by Nutanix. We're back. Rachel Mushuwa is here from Intel. She's the general manager and head of America's Industry Sales. And she's joined by Jason Kimry, who's the managing director of America's Sales at Intel. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right, so Rachel, let's start with you. What, first of all, this event, you guys are partners with Nutanix. We'll get into that in a minute, but what's Intel doing here? What's the vibe of the event? What are you talking about? So there's a variety of things that we're talking about. First of all, Nutanix is a fabulous partner of ours, but it's not just about the technology that Intel is supplying to Nutanix. And that's what's great about this event is you see so many different business folks that are focused on what are the right outcomes for their businesses and how do you start to use technology to solve business problems? And that's a big part of what Intel is helping companies do. It's all about the digital transformation and how to keep pace with your competitors so that you don't fall behind or worse, fall off the Fortune 500 list like most companies have done. So Jason, how's that conversation translated into the discussions you're having with customers? You know, I think digital transformation, that topic is everywhere. And every, there isn't a company on the planet that isn't trying to figure out how to transform their business through digital. And at Intel, there's pretty much two ways that a company can transform their business through either through culture or through technology. And we see Intel playing a key role in being that technology enabler to a digital transformation strategy. So that's a big part of our conversations and our strategy with Nutanix is how to enable companies to be more data-driven, move towards a more on-demand infrastructure, be more secure, and really look at how we can help companies adopt those technologies faster. And, frankly, how do we help them move more quickly, right? The average age of a company used to be about 60 years. The average age of a company today is less than 12 years old. Think about what that means from a digital transformation perspective and how fast companies have to move to adopt to what consumers are expecting. And that's a big part of what we do. So, Jason, I'm glad you mentioned data. So, Rachel, you were talking about digital transformation. It's kind of a buzzword that's thrown around, but when we unpack it, it seems like it's all about the data, becoming data-driven. Digital means data. It means, we just saw Amazon buy Whole Foods. And you would never think that a retailer would get into the grocery business like that, but data allows you to sort of jump these industry value chains. So, I wonder if you could talk about digital disruption and the data relevance. So, there's a variety of digital disruptions that are happening across every industry, whether you're retail or you're a transportation company or you're a health and life sciences company. Data is at the heart of all of that. And figuring out how do I address what my consumers are looking for in as close to real time as possible? How do you make those decisions just like that so that you can provide those answers back to your consumers? You know, Amazon, is it a retailer? Is it a supply chain company? Is it all of- Content company. It's all of those things. And a lot of companies are taking a step back, saying, holy moly, how do we start to transform everything all at once? And how do we use technology to leapfrog where our competitors are, right? They don't want to be knocked off that Fortune 500 list. Who saw it? Yeah, go ahead. That's what's, there's just so many cool examples of where traditional main state companies are integrating digital and becoming data companies almost overnight. If you look at John Deere, it's just one of these old line agriculture company that's really now a data company. I mean, they're applying analytics to help do more crop forensics and determine what the optimal time to plant. They're using IoT with the use of drones to survey fields. They're even using autonomous driving capabilities in putting sensors in directly into the equipment to make sure that they're planning within, driving large 120 foot wide piece of equipment to one inch of accuracy. You're just seeing incredible use of technology and it's all centered around better use of data to transform their- I mean, John Deere comes up a lot. We hear that example. Do you feel like they're sort of a leading edge of the bell curve? Or are they sort of more mainstream now? I mean, they're certainly a mainstream company, but I feel like they're advanced in terms of their data, more advanced than the average bear with their data. What's interesting about that is between now and 2018, the board of directors from all of the major companies out there will have digital transformation as part of their agenda. Probably about 60% of all of the companies that we talk to are talking about some level of digital transformation. So it's not just John Deere. You think about all of the big brands, especially with some of the big changes that are happening from a technology perspective, whether it's autonomous driving, it's the use of the smartphones, right? Apple just celebrated what? It's 10th birthday for an iPhone. This is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes just because of how fast technology's moving. So, Jason, we've been interviewing Intel I think every show we go to. The cloud shows, server storage across the board. How does Nutanix differentiate itself? How do you partner with them? Understand, of course, they've got the X86, but a lot of it's software, the hooks that Intel's been building for a long time, it can bring us a little bit inside some of the sausage-making. Well, we've been talking about reimagining the data center for years, and I think what's been really cool about Nutanix is they really are bringing that concept of life and really reimagining the data center platform. And I think what we've done is, through Silicon and a lot of our enabling technologies, we've always tried to provision those up for our partners to build innovation on top of, and Nutanix has done as good of a job as anyone is really taking advantage of those capabilities and bringing them to their customer in a way that they can consume and digest quickly, implement quickly, and really start moving fast on a data center transformation strategy almost overnight. So you talk about the digital transformation. Nutanix is one of those leading indicators out there as a strategic partner for us of, how do you help companies evolve to what they need to be to meet consumer demand, and using some of these amazing data center technologies and reimagining what the data center looks like? That's Nutanix. Yeah, Rachel is curious. You know, I said I've yet to find a CIO that said they have a convergence challenge or issue. Talked to lots of companies that are trying to figure out their cloud strategy, but it's more, how are they transforming to be more a software company? I interviewed a large financial service company that says we're going to be a software company that happens to deliver these types of solutions. So what are those critical issues that your customers are talking to? And yeah, how do you see Nutanix? You said they're helping with the digital transformation. How do they get there and how do they do even more? There's a variety of ways that Nutanix is really transforming that whole data center industry. And a big part of it is time to market. You know, one of the biggest roadblocks from a, you know, from CIO's perspective, as you said, it's not about what they want to do. It's about how they go do it. And they start running up against a variety of roadblocks of, oh my gosh, that particular application stack isn't certified on this or this software won't work on this hardware. And all of a sudden, a project that should take three to six months is now over a year, right? Time kills all deals. And it includes, it also, it, you know, kills all innovation. So with the Nutanix and Intel platform, that time to delivery is shrunk so dramatically you don't have to worry about certifying all of those different types of things. And when you go to an upgrade, it's invisible, right? That's the way technology should be. It should just work. When you answer your phone, do you think about it not working? Yeah, I want to go back. You said that, you know, 10 years ago was like the slowest that things will ever be if you look going forward. How do you find customers are keeping up with this? You know, you talk to just, you know, continuous innovation, continuous change, you know, continuous updates coming. You know, we used to just know the TikTok of Intel and that made upgrades a little bit easier. Now, you know, it's a software world. How do you find customers are keeping up with it? How do they try? So I think customers are struggling with how fast technology is moving. But one way to start to keep up with it is to use products like Nutanix, right? It takes some of the guesswork out of a variety of things in your data center. So how should we think about Nutanix inside of the Intel, I mean, Intel is the gold standard of how to build an ecosystem. Where does Nutanix fit? How should we think about this sort of new type of company? I think it starts with looking at not as a hardware company as much as a software company. They are truly agnostic across the platforms that they deploy on. Their whole goal is to abstract the applications from the hardware that it sits on. And I think really providing, it's called cloud-like capabilities for an on-prem environment. So I think that's a pretty big differentiator because they really have this software platform that runs on multiple Intel-based hardware platforms. And our goal working with them is to really help proliferate that as quickly as we can because it really is, it creates an upgrade path and a path toward transformation much quicker than it was historically possible. So we call that what you just described, cloud-like on-prem, we call it true private cloud. And substantially mimicking the public cloud. We came up with that term because there were so many fake private clouds out there. And you obviously, you see the growth in all these markets and the decline in many markets. You're seeing the public cloud explode. We see this notion of mimicking the public cloud on-prem is a huge growth area. Are you seeing the same thing? What kind of, can you add some color to that narrative? So, you know, when we talk to customers, again, across multiple industries, whether it's an energy industry, it's a transportation industry, manufacturing, you name the industry, they're all struggling with the same thing, right? Yes, public cloud is exploding, but a lot of CIOs are taking a step back saying, hey, there's some part of my data that I want to keep absolutely inside of my private cloud. There's some data that I always want to keep on-prem and there's some pieces that I want to put out to the public cloud. So we're seeing a lot of companies kind of normalize back in that middle where the pendulum swung so far to the right of, hey, boom, public cloud. And now I think they're taking a step back from a privacy and security perspective saying, what's the happy medium here? So, please. Well, I just, I think we just, public cloud, which we love, did an incredible job of making people aware of how quickly it was possible to deploy resources or deploy VMs very quickly in a way that was never possible before in an on-prem environment. Partners like Nutanix, and I would say Nutanix really led a lot of this, really bringing that public cloud capability to an on-prem environment. The application rationalization and the application virtualization, a lot of those capabilities that were very simple in a cloud environment are now just as simple in an on-prem environment. It's why we see that normalization that brings a lot of things. So just when we thought this was a zero-sum game, it was like public cloud versus on-prem, IoT comes in and advances in connectivity and data. It's like a tide that lifts all boats. What are you guys seeing in IoT? Maybe you could make some comments there. Sure. So I think IoT is just beginning to catch the next wave. For a while, folks have been talking about the internet of things and how it's going to help transform industries and how you can use sensors to detect everything from soil erosion as related to the John Deere to what are we doing for an average consumer who walks down an aisle in your favorite retail store? How do we start to deliver them personalized messages? So IoT is again changing that game and moving up that sigmoid curve of change. And you go back to, look today, right now at this moment, the least amount of change that you'll see in five minutes from now, there's going to be some other big tech announcement or some big evolution. That's kind of the beauty of where we sit in today's world. About every 100 years, we enter this big change or this big disruption. And this one is going to be driven by compute and Intel is all about compute. Are you guys paranoid? Absolutely. I think we're excited about it. We're paranoid as well. All but the paranoid survive. That's right, that's right. This data explosion through IoT, it really fuels what Intel calls our virtuous cycle of growth. The more data, the more endpoints that hit the network, the more data that creates, the more requirement for data center and data. I totally agree. We used to say it was kind of customers that were the flywheel and data is the potential to be the flywheel for the next 10 years. To Rachel's point, we're excited. Data is the new oil. But the magic is going to be in how we refine that data. Yeah, I mean, I always say data is plentiful but insights aren't. And those companies that can find those insights and gain a competitive advantage and as you've been pointing out, both you, Rachel and Jason, the cycles are so fast, it's, you know, one insight is not enough. It's not sufficient. You have to continuously iterate. Speed is the game. It is the game. And you guys play that game well. So thanks. Thanks very much for sharing your insights. Great, thank you. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. All right, keep right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE. We're live from DC at Nutanix.next. We're right back.