 from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT at Nutanix. We are here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Wendy M. Pfeiffer. She is the Chief Information Officer at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Wendy. Thank you for having me. And this is not your first time, you're a CUBE alum. I am a CUBE alum. It's so much fun. It's kind of weird though. We're inside of this CUBE and outside of us is all the action in the exposition hall. It's kind of crazy and cool. It is, it does a lot of energy here. I want to start our conversation by taking you back in time to 1980s, you growing up in Silicon Valley. You notice an advertisement in the newspaper, that dead tree medium. NASA wants ideas on how to organize its dashboard better for astronauts. Yeah, so they had a program called CDTI, Cockpit Displays of Traffic Information. And they were looking for innovative ideas to make what was really a very small display, provide information for the shuttle astronauts as they were re-entering the atmosphere. And so if you can imagine coming back into the atmosphere at very high speed, and there was concern that there would be air traffic in the area, regular airplanes flying relatively much slower. And so how could the same air traffic displays that were used for aviators be sort of modified to give real-time information to the astronauts? I will tell you that I never contributed much to that project, but I discovered large-scale computer systems. And I just, I loved the idea of these things, large networks, large computers, and just the sort of the vast interconnectedness of things. And so that got me interested in technology, whereas before, I thought I was interested in science and math. And it turns out, of course, there's some great synergy among those topics. So the internship at NASA is what propelled your interest and really what launched your career in technology. Now you are the CIO of Nutanix, this amazing company, this startup that's now billion, with a market cap in multiple billions of dollars. So talk a little bit about your experience as CIO and what you're hearing particularly at this .NEXT show. Yeah, I think one of the things that's happening is we're all in the midst of a huge transformation in terms of how digital technology affects business and empowers and enables business. And as CIOs, we're right in the middle of that. We have, many of us have tons of legacy equipment and things from vendors, but we also have this desire for leading digital transformation in our companies. And so companies like Nutanix, and there aren't many companies like Nutanix, but technologies like ours bridge that gap. We can run the legacy workloads in on-premise data centers, on pick a vendor's hardware, but we can also run those same workloads on our operating system in public clouds. And so it's kind of the best of both worlds and it bridges these two worlds that CIOs have been struggling to bridge. And it does so in a way that doesn't require us to retrain our people or find a small team of rocket scientists who are worth more than the GDP of small countries. So we're able to actually execute, still keep the lights on, still do the old school things that we need to do, but also operate with excellence at that more modern end of the technology spectrum. So that's huge. And I'm hearing that from so many folks all around the show, whether it's people who are responsible for infrastructure or DevOps kind of crosses all of those bridges. And as Nutanix, a CIO, I get to represent how any company like ours, a billion and a half dollar publicly traded company can use technology to enable itself because I use our technology to do all the things we need to do as a company. But that's exactly just what you're talking about that balance that these companies need to strike with thinking about the maintenance, thinking about the storage, thinking about the protection, but then also thinking in a much more visionary and strategic way about how we really transform our business and get the work done that we need to get done. Can you talk a little bit about the fact that these consumer technologies have really leapfrogged the enterprise IT vendors and sort of how embarrassing it frankly should be for these big technology behemoths that they haven't done more to make cooler, sleeker technologies? Absolutely. Oh my gosh, this is my favorite topic and it's why I have my smartphone here. So on this smartphone, this is an Apple phone, on this smartphone I have a ton of applications and a ton of functionality. And you know, so I have Facebook on my smartphone, right? And I love Facebook, but when I downloaded and I started using Facebook, I didn't say, you know, oh my gosh, well now I have my social media application so there's no way I could use Twitter or Instagram or anything else because my standard is Facebook and that's the only thing I'm going to use. No, no, no. I have a multitude of apps and I use them as I choose when I want to and the way that I want to. Those apps inherit things from this platform. They have access to my contact data. They understand my location if I allow them to, et cetera. So all of those things are unconsciously in what is actually a phone. Now try to get your desk phone to do that, right? It doesn't. And yet in the enterprise IT space, we have vendors who are selling us for millions of dollars, desk phones. And those are supposed to be as performant, delightful, interesting as this device. And then we have laptop computers and we have desktop computers. None of those things is even a third as interesting, engaging, useful and easy to use as this consumer tech, which by the way is a lot less expensive. I spend millions of dollars on AV, audio visual, room systems, conferencing technology. Whereas when I go home, I can say to Amazon or Google, hey, you know, Amazon, show me my shows. You know, I can ask for any show I want to watch on TV. When I downloaded Pokemon Go, I love playing video games and games. When I downloaded Pokemon Go on my phone, I didn't have to watch, you know, five five minute video snippets to teach me how to install the application. Within minutes, I was catching all the Pokemon I could in what is really a very complex application that also includes augmented reality. And so I think it's time that first of all, the vendors who sell to us, who are so used to that every three years, the enterprise license agreement is renewed, or you know, hey, we're a pick something, you know, one hardware vendor's shop, so that's what we standardize on. That is doing two things. One, they're killing their own industry and they're also killing IT. They are ruining IT's ability to deliver and to be useful and transformative to companies. We in IT, we also have to demand better. We have to stop buying that junk and we have to start finding ways, whether we have to build it ourselves or using machine learning tools to train the machine on how to do these things that enterprise IT companies don't deliver to us. And we also need to look for vendors like Nutanix that build that bridge that allow us to stop worrying about, oh my gosh, you know, we've got to make this legacy thing work with this new thing. We don't have to worry about that so much anymore and now we can focus on this user experience, the interaction design, what we might do within the ecosystem that is our own unique companies and our own unique set of systems and also ultimately allowing our people, which is what companies are made up of, allowing our people to have the experience that they want to have just like we do with our own devices. I can choose how I want to interact with this thing and I can turn it off if I don't want to use it. So much of what you're talking about is really about getting companies and the leaders of these companies to think differently. And that is the biggest managerial challenge and it's a challenge when you're in sales and so how do you approach that problem? Because you've really laid it out so clearly. We are used to so much intuitiveness and ease and beauty in the technology that we use in our personal lives and then we come to work and we put up with a lot of junk. We do, right? I mean like I know you're not saying anything out loud but I know you're agreeing with me here with your laptop on the table there. You know, first of all, our workforces are changing generally. We keep talking at least in circles that I sit in about the millennials are entering the workforce. No, the millennials and Gen Z are already make up almost half of our workforce today and we'll be at that somewhere around, I think it's 70% by 2025 of the workforce. So they're already here. Those folks already have a different relationship with technology than my generation did. My generation, and I'm a Gen X, I think, yeah. So my, yeah. My club too. Exactly. So the big hair, 80s. My generation watched the birth of some of these consumer technologies but this next couple of generations grew up with them already in place and so they don't even think about the fact that this is technology. This is just part of them. And so I think we need to throw off the old filters and get out of the way. It's a lot more about choice and self-service and freedom and flexibility and a mixed portfolio. And there are so many ways to educate ourselves about those things if we don't naturally have that instinct but it starts with diverse thinking, diverse tools. I believe that whatever PC, Mac, laptop, tablet, mobile device that you're comfortable with your company should enable you to use and you should use the applications that make the most sense to you that make you the most productive. And then it's IT's job or it's leadership's job to create that really rich ecosystem where those applications and tools have the nutrients that they need and the capabilities that they need to work together. Well, understanding how to create and maintain that ecosystem. I mean, what is an ecosystem? It's this sort of happy accident of all sorts of creatures at various levels in the pyramid coming together and figuring out a way to cohabit and to survive and then hopefully to thrive. And so no one can get too important. No one voice, no one species, no one layer can be outsized compared to the others because if so, what do you have? Well, you have a species collapse. They run out of the fuel that helps them to thrive. And so I think of course our planet at a macro level is an example of that but our companies, our families, our neighborhoods all of those things are micro examples that match the macro and are dependent on the same laws of physics and science and so on in order to thrive into function. Well, you're talking, you just highlighted the importance of diversity. And you made this comment about no one person can get too important or no one part of the species. In fact, if you look at the tech landscape, we know who's too important and that's the bros who are running the show in a lot of ways still. I want to hear from you as a senior leader, a female senior leader in technology. You noticed, I'm female, thank you. The manicure. Yeah, that was it, yeah, yeah. But how, what do you, tell us what it's like. I mean, is it as bad as we hear and how have you in your career overcome a lot of these challenges and then what do you see as your responsibility to the next generation who's coming up? Absolutely, so it is as bad as we hear. It's sometimes worse than we hear. And I think that especially there are certain sectors of society and tech society where the bro culture that we've heard about is fully in play. What mitigates that is the human beings who make up the bro culture. So often these guys don't understand the effect of all of them in mass. And so often they're just being natural. Many, especially startups, the startups that fuel Silicon Valley, they started with some great ideas and with some dreamers. And often those people with the great ideas and dreamers, they are males. And what do you do? You get your buddies together. When you get a little extra money, you get the next round of buddies, you invite people you know. So there's a little bit of that syndrome that's happening. There are also wonderful incubators and fields where women are also in that startup mode. And I'm a member of the Board of Girls in Tech. We have a number of things like a, we have an amplify competition that supports women tech entrepreneurs. So there's certainly more than just men, but the history has been that. However, lots of people talk about that. For me, that's not the emphasis. For me, the emphasis is on how we change our jobs and our definition of work in general. And this is so fascinating to me. I think we've been working for years and years on, how do we get more women in STEM and encourage girls to go through this path in school? You know, it turns out women and men are both equally interested in science and math and all those things. But the starting jobs in tech are horrendous when it comes to matching women's interests and skills. And this is, I'm going to stereotype here, I hate doing this, but in general terms, men tend to be able to work on things serially. They tend to have a singular focus and to appreciate the singular focus. And so you can lay out a path first your socks and your shoes and the guy will follow that and will master each step along the way. And that's a way that, you know, stereotypically a lot of male brains progress. For women, for female brains, we're multifaceted. We sort of have this ability, I don't know if it's evolutionary or environment or whatever, I'm not like an expert, thank God. But we have this ability to multitask all the time. I can be, you know, holding my kid and talking on the phone and, you know, making sure dinner's cooking okay. And, you know, maybe it's a business call and I might be hiring someone or firing someone. And I'm giving equal focused attention to each very important task. And so we sort of have that ability. Because we have that ability, that the kind of job that, you know, okay, you enter college and you're taking a software development, you know, computer science course and you take all computer science courses until you get that degree. And now you get your first software developer job and you sit in this little cubicle and all day long, you write code. Well, you know, if I'm, if I've sort of have that single threaded mentality, I'm ready, all right, yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to master this. I'm going to get through the layers of writing code as fast as I can and someday I'll rule the world or start my own company. Over on the female side, we say this is going to kill me. I don't want to do that. What a boring job is because, because also I'm interested in, I'm interested in the Japanese language and I'm interested in design. And, you know, I love to cook. And also, you know, I'm just been working through, you know, theories of space and time and in my physics study and to just have to focus my mind all by myself all day long in this cubicle on writing, you know, some part of a bigger program, it's not attractive. And so what we find is that women are dropping out of these focused degree programs and they're dropping out of the early stages of technology careers, which means that by the time you get to my stage, there are very, very few of us, right? So you said we need to change the definition of work. Yes. What does that mean? Well, the millennials and Gen Z and countries that are very young, like some of the Eastern European countries that are just reinventing themselves, they've already done that. It's the gig economy. It's the idea that as an individual, I can choose the things I want to work on. We've tried to sort of emulate that in the agile methodologies, right? I get to choose my tasks, but it's this sort of, we've taken the soul out of it. But this is really that independent contractors might be doing, you know, a few things at once. I might be designing shoes like one of my friends is, she's created her own shoe company. And at the same time, I might be writing code as a gig for some other company. And you know what? I might also be involved in a charitable work or I might be volunteering at my kid's school and doing all of those things together at the same time in parallel is interesting to us. It's engaging to us. We put more energy into that. So how do you do that at your team at Nutanix? How do you help your employees do all the things that they want to do in addition to obviously getting their work done under the CIO? Well, it's always a balance, right? One of the really important things is to create an environment of tools and technologies and processes that allow people to choose the things they want to choose. It's not always well understood. Some people say, thank you. I get to use the tools I like. Other people say, there's too many tools. What do we do? And so we try to find something down the middle for those guys. Exactly. You know, secondly, I hire and mentor leaders who are very diverse and open in their thinking so that we can constantly kind of reinvent ourselves as an IT organization. But ultimately it gets down to enabling culturally people to think differently, to raise their hand and say, you know, I am a network engineer, but I would like to automate this thing over here. Or, you know, I, yes, I'm a systems engineer, but I'd like to deploy the network, just allowing them to get out of their comfort zone and to experiment. It's also really important to understand the balance of IT. People who choose IT love engineering and love technology, but we also love process and interaction. And so we're already this mashup of personality types. And, you know, I would say the more multifaceted you are, the more you're able to play multiple sports or have multiple skills or play offense and defense, then the more able you are to thrive in the new world and the new economy. And sometimes it's just finding those mavericks or, you know, I like to say I'm a little civil-like, you know, I've got multiple personalities. And you know, sometimes you got to bring one of those personalities to the table. Sometimes you have to bring many of those personalities to the table. And it's got to be okay for folks to do that. I love it. I love it. Great. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always fun talking to you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching theCUBE. There'll be much more to come.