 Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEX Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here in Nice, France with Nutanix.NEX. Happy to welcome back to the program to return guests. Binny Gill and Aditya Sood, both with Nutanix, as I said, Binny's the chief architect, Aditya's senior director of engineering. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right. So, but for about the last year, we've been looking at, okay, Nutanix, you talked about enterprise cloud. What does that really mean? How do you, as Dheeraj said, the goal is to become an iconic software company. Yep. So Aditya's goal, started with a couple of acquisitions. Really this week, it feels like we're kind of expanding a little bit on what kind of the Nutanix cloud portfolio, if you will, is going to look like. So, first, Aditya, pretty busy. So, since you came into the Nutanix fold, bring us up to speed as, you know, what you've been up to since the last time we talked. Ciao. Thank you, Astru. The last year or so, we have spent integrating Calm into the Nutanix platform and also just enhancing it so the true multi-cloud capability of different platforms come together. And I think this is one of the fundamental building blocks for the modern next generation enterprise clouds on services as well as a service-centric lifecycle approach. And that's what we have been up to. Yeah. So, just to dig in for one second here, because Calm absolutely seems central, kind of cloud and XI, the two things we've been talking about a lot. I've talked to a couple of customers that have had kind of that early limited access. They've been really happy. A lot of customers that I've talked to, they're like, ah, I've seen the slides. I'm hoping to see some demos, but you know, they can't wait to get their hands on it to, because as Nutanix has done in the past, you know, some bold claims, but will the product deliver? So where are we, when does everybody get their hands on it, and you know, get beaten on it? Sure. We have been running some early access betas with customers for the last two or three months and the response for us has been phenomenal. Our partners are very excited. Our customers are excited. And as well as all of Nutanix is very excited. And I think sometime later this month is when we will push this thing out there to see how it works out. But so far, looking pretty good. All right, excellent. All right, Benny, a lot of new announcements. I mean, we had Sunil on, we went through, there's all the 5.5 stuff, but you know, he brings you on stage and talk about some of the future things, as I said, expanding out kind of the cloud stack. Give us a little bit, kind of the architect view as to, you know, how you're deciding, you know, what to build, and then you know, give us the thumbnails to what's coming. Yeah, so essentially, you know, what we are trying to build is a, as you talked about earlier, an enterprise cloud OS. Now let me put some more meat to that statement. Essentially, an operating system is something where you run applications, right? In the back in the old days, operating systems would run on my desktop. Like it could be a Linux operating system or Windows operating system. And my app would just run in one host. Today, apps run on clouds, right? So the cloud is the new operating system. There are multiple operating systems out there. There's AWS, there's Azure, there's GCP. What does the enterprise have, right? Enterprise doesn't have a good operating system and that's our goal. So what we are saying is we need to build all the aspects of an operating system that means starting from a marketplace, you know, from where you download an application to come, which can deploy an application to a run time, like a HV where the application runs to the networking, to storage and security. All these aspects is what we are building. And if you can see how we are progressing over the last two, three years on this, we have made tremendous progress on a lot of these fronts. And if you look at the announcements that we are making, these are very strategic in that direction. How can we make the right components fit into the picture at the right time? All right. And let's speak a little bit to some of the announcements made. Yeah, so if you look at so far what we have done, we've had Acropolis block services and file services and services that allow you to run your Mode 1 apps better, right? Now we're looking at the next generation cloud native applications. One of the first, you know, key things to have is an object store. If you look at how the public cloud evolved, it started with an object store from Mode 2 applications, we announced that, the object store service. And again, in true Nutanix fashion, it's going to be highly scalable, elastic. We are looking at global scale and how can you build an object store, not only to reside in one cloud and sort of be like a lock-in, but rather have it in a distributed dispersed cloud fashion with DR capabilities, backup snapshot. The old constructs of mobility are still needed in this next generation dispersed cloud. So that is one of the things. The other announcement we made was around the compute cloud, right? So you've seen Nutanix bring in hyper-converged first, then we said you can add storage only nodes. Now we are saying you can add compute only, storage less nodes. And the whole idea is that now you can run EHV on a lot more servers. Even the servers that you have earlier invested in, you can bring them in into the Nutanix fabric and manage from prism. One place to manage all your compute farm, all your hyper-converged farm, and all your storage farm. So that's pretty exciting right now. Yeah, and it's interesting. Those people that would loan, they're like, oh, well Nutanix is a hyper-converged infrastructure player. Well, that service you described, AC2, there's no storage. It's not hyper-converged, right? So is HCI just, you know, it's a piece of the portfolio? How do you look at that from an engineering standpoint? HCI was the sort of the hammer that we needed to use to get rid of the legacy, if you think about it. But so that essentially got rid of the complexity of three-tier architecture, three-tier mindset. Once that's gone, and we now say that, okay, this is one compute fabric, and the storage fabric could be married to it, or in some cases it could be separate. That's completely fine. As long as there's one stack that you're dealing with, you know, a single place where you can go and upgrade your BIOS firmware, disk firmware, NIC firmware, hypervisor, you know, the storage controller, that makes it an operating system in some sense, right? And OS is one place where, you know, it's still holistic. It doesn't have, like, I don't buy parts of an OS from different companies, right? It's one OS. And that's what we're building. So, HCI was a means to an end. I think now building an OS for the cloud is the next goal. All right, so Aditya, we hear the message of a one OS, but if I look at any IT environment, they have and, because they add something new, and they have their old stuff, and then they add something new, and it's always heterogeneous. Well, I've got vSphere and AHV. I've got AWS and, you know, GCP. Management has to kind of deal with that, and it's been something we've been struggling in this industry for longer than I've been in the industry. So, how are you looking at this? You know, where do you feel that Nutanix and Calm is going to help, you know, to try to, you know, not silver bullet, hopefully single pane of glass doesn't, you know, get discussed too much, but, you know, what realistically, you know, what do you solve, and what advice do you give customers to try to help them through this? Sure. So, the way we look at it, that's a reality today, right? The fractured reality of infrastructure in the enterprise and different kind of vendor stacks running together. And to riff off Vinny's example, an operating system forever had different devices, different hardware devices from different vendors, but by using things like device drivers or file abstractions, built a consistent, layered platform on top of them. So, each application did not read to be written off, oh, I'm reading this network card or that network card and so on. So, that's how we are looking at this layered approach in Calm as well from Nutanix, that yes, there is going to be AWS, there is going to be GCP, but on top of this, a single layer can be built, which can go ahead and allow the applications to abstract those parts out. That being said, there is no silver bullet for any of this. There are trade-offs involved, but we like to think, and based on the feedback that we have seen over the last year or so of running betas and getting customer interactions, partnerships, agreements, is it takes at least, I would say, 80, 90% of the complexity over. Now, I will specifically not use a single pane of glass word, because you said so, very rightly so, but I think as close as coming in, and not just as a single screen, but as a single abstraction across multiple pieces of infrastructure, is what we are going and building now. Yeah, and I've talked to a number of the Nutanix partners and restful APIs come up all the time, and that's how it's easy for them to integrate with the services, it's kind of core fundamental of what we look at today, yes? Yeah, yeah, Vinny, when I think about the channel and I think about your customers, selling a appliance is relatively easy. Selling software and services and all these pieces, that is a little bit different mindset for them. How do you help with kind of the customers and the go to market for what you're building today so that they're, how do you get them ready for that? How are you listening to them? How is the feedback you're getting from people impact kind of what and how you're building it? Yeah, so we see all sorts of requirements actually coming in, there are some large customers who still love our appliance model, where essentially they can just buy Nutanix appliances and then forget about managing them or who do they need to call, it's one number to call, one throat to choke, quote and quote. And then there are some others who want to be more picky in terms of hey, this is the hardware I need to get because I have great contacts with Taiwan or China and I'll get the hardware from there. I also have been using that in my other server farms. They are using just software from us, so we sell them software only. So there are many different ways in which we are solving for what customers want and there's no one size fits all and that's the beauty of this, I mean just like I can take Linux, I can package it as an appliance and sell, hey this is a router or something else or maybe a custom supercomputer or I could just have it independent. The beauty of an OS is that it's very flexible in what, how you package it, right? And that packaging will be very diverse and the partner ecosystem will build around that operating system as Aditya was saying. And as you see in this expo, there are a lot of partners excited about working with our OS and adding their value add on top of it. All right, so, Vinny, we heard there's a lot of features you're rolling out through Community Edition or CE first. When I saw the announcements of kind of the object and the compute, there's like the disclaimer, it's like well this is future stuff we're working on but we're not giving you a date. So software company, how do you give guidance on this? Get announced, when should we expect to see it? In beta, Community Edition, and it kind of generally available. Look, you're a public company, you can't give too much but general guidance, philosophy, engineering standpoint. How do we look, we've gone away from the 18 month major release cycle, so how do you look at release cycles and way to get them out? Yeah, a couple of things. One is that we are going towards an agile model in terms of how releases will be done. Like Aditya's team would be releasing calm at a different cadence compared to, for example, our storage fabric, right? Although this is still one OS but you can upgrade pieces in it, right? Separately and they can come faster. So basically the new services that come in, they'll need more quicker iteration and that's how they will be iterated on. And the older services where you care about, hey, I don't want to corrupt my data and all that, there you'll be more conservative by nature, right? And that's essentially, you'll see that's the transition that's going to happen in how we do stuff. One of the core principle like philosophies that we have in mind is that we want to make sure that the experience that our customers have, right? Today with Nutanix on-prem is maintained, right? Say if they want the five, nine, six, nine reliability, if they want the NPS of 90 plus, that's what you need to. So even when we started, the reason we started with our own appliance was precisely that. We want to control the experience. Then when we went with OEMs and partners, we were very strict in what we allow, what we don't allow so that the experience is maintained. You will see the same thing going forward. So we're not about just throwing in a bunch of features because so many people are waiting for it, but the quality goes down. We're not that. We want to make sure that even when we talk about hybrid cloud and XI, and we're talking about DR as a service, I mean, what will your DR, your business critical, mission critical apps? So you expect the same quality, right? So that's what you should expect from Nutanix that if it is GA, it holds up to the bar. Net promoter score will be maintained very high. All right, Aditya, last question I have for you is in an event like this, you get to talk to a lot of customers. I'm sure there's huge requests. Talk to a lot of customers. They're excited about what you're doing and they want to know not only GA, but kind of road map. What can you share with us as kind of some of the big pieces? What should we be looking for beyond the availability itself when it comes to your activities? Sure, I think I of course can't go into too much amount of detail because I got to unveil it at the right time. But some of the things that we are, one core thing we are specifically looking at is how to bridge the chasm between the old school, mode one applications and mode two container based, modern entirely cloud native applications. Like all the majority of a lot of enterprise today is stuck in this side of the divide. And it's I think very simplistic and naive to say just rewrite all your applications to fit into containers or the modern cloud and everything. So we are building a bunch of technologies which you are here and iteratively incrementally get you over to the other side without doing rewrites, maintaining up time and hopefully minimizing your spend. That's great. Yeah, Vinny, I was in the keynote today, we heard more about kind of the edge computing Sajim talked about it. There's certain parts of the market I talked to. It's like, well, containers are pretty much a given at this point. Heck, serverless is something we're talking about a lot. Now, how is engineering and architecture, keep up with this change? How do you look at some of these dynamics? How do you make sure you don't kind of over rotate too fast, you want to be with your customers not too far ahead of them? Oh yeah, so even in the keynote today you might have noticed right the way we look at the problem of how our customers will move to the next level for them. And every customer is at a different phase in this journey towards building their true enterprise hybrid cloud, right? Some are still virtualizing, you know, to be frank and some of them are moving from three tier to hyperconverse and some of them from hyperconverse to hey, I need a better hypervisor with the HV and then I need calm and then I need Xi and so on, right? So they're in a journey. The way we look at this entire transition even when you talk about IoT is like have it as another phase in the evolution, don't force it on everybody, right? So IoT is being built as a layer after you're standardized on calm, for example. Then you can use calm as a way of saying now I need to enable some services that will create the foundation for building my IoT apps, right? So function as a service and all that would be managed by the cloud admin using calm. So we're building things in layers and IoT is yet another layer that'll come out in some time. All right, well, Benny Gill, Aditya Sude, thank you so much for giving us all the updates. We look forward to the releases and the future announcements. We'll be back with more coverage here. Nutanix next, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.