 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the global.next digital experience brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix.next global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fountain Blue in Miami of course, Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on and the first time they've done a first day global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program to help kick it off. First of all, we have Monica Kamar. She is the senior vice president of marketing with Nutanix and also joining us is Virginia Gumballi. She is a managing partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you Stu. So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two and lots of announcements with partners, customers of course speaking and lots of the Newton's. So Monica, maybe start with you. You've had a very close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up, give us from your standpoint really kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in person. Yeah, thank you so much Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously the world is so different now, right? And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees and society at large. So along the same lines, Dotnex has evolved to of course also being a virtual event, but at the same time the biggest design factor for Dotnex is really the connection with customers, partners, employees and influencers and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we're living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future of financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that? And of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor, help our customers navigate these uncertain times? So that's how most of our content is designed on day one and then day two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure. It's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions and use a computing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be a day two and then day three is a partner exchange. So obviously partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners and helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. Well, you know, I always find the dot next experience is a very broad and enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey to watch or participate or go to the dot next for Nutanix because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual dot next, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. Well, yeah, Virginia, bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology and there's lots of that, but what personally, how do I enrich myself? How do I enrich my career? How do I enrich my community? That heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing for a couple of years. It was the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Deerage teams out, he said, okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix clusters with AWS and at the show, Scott Guthrie, course wearing the signature red polo and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies and things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multi-cloud world. So I would love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing and the new from Nutanix standpoint. Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .next is our partnership with Azure and we are super excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix clusters are going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers. You rightfully mentioned Azure Arc. We are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure Cloud. So ultimately for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers. The end is better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately that's what technology is doing is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly and then manage it very easily. And by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When we say cloud and when we say hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, it's of course on-premises, it's of course the hyperscaler clouds, but then there's service provider clouds, right? Because in region, and then by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Sodani, he's the CTO at SOC Gen. He joined us as well in one of the keynotes. And obviously they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider clouds, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. Virginia, of course the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations, we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monaco was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or are there some things that people are saying, hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months? Well, I can tell you from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on which span from financial services to pure tech all the way through to consumer facing businesses. I really see the spectrum. And three years ago when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now we are full on, we are in it. And Monaco talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think is really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer facing functions to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, okay, this stuff isn't so scary. We are in it. We need it for being able to function in the COVID world. And we also need it because our customers need us to need this to have it. So when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management and also cyber seem to be sort of three very important themes of the day. And I believe that today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like, you know, when you were talking, it just reminded me in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, you know, CIOs were all about knowing technology, know how and managing costs and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT. IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So that's, you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss at .NEXT is how can technology help our customers innovate and at the same time be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. Yes. And also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. Well, yeah, Monica, you know, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did and, you know, in talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, you know, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things live. The one piece that you didn't cover yet that Virginia teed up, cybersecurity. So, you know, absolutely, we need innovation. We need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, was already at the top of the list. Oh my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, you know, Nutanix, along with your partners, are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? Absolutely. You know, you mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day one. Add to that security. Security has been a guiding light from day one and security is built into a platform. It's not an afterthought. It's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise, business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's, you know, our core technology platform where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our newer portfolio products. You know, last time I think Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. You know, 10 years ago, we started with our core foundation, which is hyper-converged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services like other storage, different types of storage consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR. We've added DevOps and database services. We've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on it, databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it. And be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure. So that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. Virginia, if Dave Vellante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards. I'd love to hear a little bit your insights there as to the security that Monica talked up. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? Well, Stu, there is no question. Historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place. And can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment? Fast forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help? But in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's gonna be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post-event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, okay, I can begin to understand that. I often give an example of it. You're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the outside and sensors in the windows and in the doors. It's, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. Yeah, definitely it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drumbeat we've seen. Monica, question for you on that theme is in many ways the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? Absolutely, as I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they're supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience and it's employee experience. So in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this. And again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And of course, with AI machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there, right? Around automation and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes very quickly is, okay, great. I've automated everything. IT has become a service. My service provider, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service level agreements. Well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on demand spin-up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in. That's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate Nirvana that we are hearing from many customers is, they wanna be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't wanna be stuck and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also wanna have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else. And that's the ultimate Nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments. It's all done through one single plane. And that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization all the way to this hybrid multi-cloud world with a single unified management plane, ability to move data applications and license around as they choose to, and be able to have a cost-optimized solution. And let me add to that because I love what Monica's saying. As a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in, as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties. As a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but would love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's who appearance. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Deerage Pandey, is that there's a transition, there's a look looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he said he will be a Newton forever, even though his role will become a little bit more invisible. Of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago, because I really wanted to express to the world, how blown away I am by our founder, Deerage. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders, and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs, and they came in after the fact. And it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who end up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact thing, which is his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say at a certain point in time, I have taken this, this thing that I have created to a certain point. And now it is yet at another inflection point and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet from do I have the right talent? Do I have the right offering? Do I have the right capital position? Do I have the right board? Do I have the right person at the helm? And I spent a lot of time talking with Dero, which is a gift and a pleasure in life. And to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise I would not have joined this board. We all have, you know, our lives are challenged and life is short. And we wanna spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base and now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good. The partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to be, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but it's just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here and I'm very excited. Yeah, I'll add to that. So first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent. And for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point they leave for college, right? And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture. But I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company. He's built it up. He's given us all the right culture principles. And now he's sending us off to call it saying, okay, this is the next phase of your life. Go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level. And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company. I've been here for a year and a half. We have amazing talent. People are important. We have amazing innovations. And by the way, this new year, we started our fiscal year in August. It's gonna be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks. A lot more is coming down. And then there is some process that we've put in place. So people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life. And he's always gonna be there for us as an advisor, just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to, you know, doing other things in life. That's what I believe. Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. At theCUBE, it really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix.next event. And great to catch up with both of you. Thank you so much for working with us. Thank you. All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix.next Digital Experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.