 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the global.next digital experience brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix.next digital experience. We've got two of the C-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program. Two of our CUBE alumni, first of all, we have Tarkin Maynard. He is the chief customer officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajeev Murani. He is the chief technology officer, CTO. Rajeev, Tarkin, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Great to be back, good to see you. All right, so Tarkin, talk about, you know, a number of announcements. So you had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, you know, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature, you know, red polo, you had Kurt Scalgan from Lenovo, of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others. And even my understanding, the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a lot of stuff to go into partnerships don't need to tackle it all here up front, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajeev and I have been really busy. You know, last few months, last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made, the new 750 million dollar investment from Bain Capital, amazing F520 results, Q4 big results. And obviously in the last few months, big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multi-cloud vision. And obviously Rajeev and I are making several, you know, announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at that next. So at a high level, I know Rajeev is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises around better, around faster and around anywhere. We're not stealing the thunder from Rajeev, but I just want to give you at a high level what excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and with all this new IP innovation announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and an operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multi-cloud era. Obviously we are the only true independent software vendor at two billion dollar run rate business in a sense with fast growth. Tying to that announcement chain, we made this big announcement with Azure partnership. Our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster brand now available as a bare metal service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. It just announced the first angle of it, limited access customers are taking a look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers as well. Tying that obviously big focus with our Cypdix partnership globally around our end user computing business is relatively outlined further. Our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure time, the data center services, DevOps services and end user computing services, Cypdix partnership becomes a big one. And obviously we're tying the Lenovo and HPE partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll recover a little bit more further in more detail but one other cloud partnership we are also focusing on our Google partnership around desktop as a service. So these are all coming together around data center, DevOps and user computing services on top of that amazing infrastructure Regimen team built over the past 10 years. I see Regimen as one of our co-founders and one side with the rise in others. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This is it by 21, 20 was a great starting point with all this investment with main capital, $750 million, big execution, a CD transition, software transition and obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make a big difference as we move forward. Yeah, so Rajiv, I want to build off what Tarkin was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, I really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix, more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and experiences as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. Yeah, actually, the team around all these announcements is the same, really. It's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, you know, SAP HANAs and Epic and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application. We want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless and secure, but we want to be able to run every application. We want to run it with great performance. So if we look at the announcements that we have made around strengthening the core with the block store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we have made around building carbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on-premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then, of course, we want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers or in the public cloud in the hyperscaler. So we give them that whole range of choices. And you can see that all the announcements fit into that one team, any application anywhere. That's basically it. Well, I'd like you to build on just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space, of course, carbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .next was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it. So where does Nutanix touch the developer? How does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? Yeah, great questions too. So last year we introduced carbon for the first time. And if you look at carbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience. So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a carbon cluster or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself, we wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer, we offered a Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself. We want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our cube cuttle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go for carbon built yet on the Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we have a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self-contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases, don't have to manage it yourself, you have object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate the development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand, said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere, public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. Tarkin, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HPE Discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajeev was just talking about, that's a real change. If you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people, they're needing to move up the stack, you've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect of as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize how your partners and your channel can still participate. So perfect, look, Stu, as you heard from Rajeev, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajeev outlined with the data center operations and services, DevOps services to enable that faster time to market capability with our Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry leading record-breaking digital infrastructure that hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with the wording a little bit. As you remember, we used to call hyper-converse infrastructure, now we call it hyper-cloud infrastructure in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end to end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software-only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company, which is making a huge difference, gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically, is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajeev also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three-pronged approach on top of our on-prem marketplace, on-prem capabilities with 17,000 plus customers, 7,000 plus channel and strategic partners, also as part of this, we're announcing this new partner program, we call Elevate, under Elevate Brands, bringing all the channel partners, ISPs, platform partners, hyper-skillers, telco-XSPs and our go-to-market partners all in one bucket, where we manage them simply with incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that. Obviously Chris Caderis, our chief revenue officer as well as Christian Alvarez, our chief partner officer, so to speak, he runs globally all the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, coming to what Rajeev said earlier, on the multi-cloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanis cloud under the Zai brand, XI, Zai brand, which is basically our own logistics, basically serviceability, payment capability, and our software running on our Kolo partnerships, like Equonix, delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now, we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the back-end, that data center as a service might be actually HPE GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Also on top of that, we have these Talco XSB partnerships as we're announcing partnerships with some amazing service providers like OVH. You heard today from Khalid Sudani at Society General, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal deployments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. French company dealing with French business and data centers with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context, we have also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're gonna announce a partnership with OVH as well, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure and we're not gonna stop there, obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that, he announced just today with Capgemini a new DevTest environment as a service where Rajiv's portfolio, N2N, data center DevOps and some of the UC capabilities for DevTest reasons can run as a service on Capgemini Cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, with similar partnerships with Bitcoin. We're super excited for this .NEXT and FY21 because of those reasons. Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is I wanna be able to have that optionality. I wanna be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I wanna be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live in these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google and Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? And you have to integrate with all of these partners yet not lock out the features that they keep adding. Right, absolutely. That's the great points too. And that's something we pride ourselves on that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers where we run an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide. And essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we built from top to bottom, make it available so the same experiences is there with upgrades and prism, the same experiences available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do, right? I mean, the kind of thing that, you know, say Google does with AI or Azure does with databases, it's remarkable what these guys are doing and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these services. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor at rewrite before you can move. That's been extremely important for us. And, you know, it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic, I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and time frames you never thought you needed to, right? So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But, you know, it's a kind of agility that an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint as things are moving fast. What's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020? Argan? So look, you know, you heard from us, Stu, and now you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us end to end. Look, for a company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation and execution and operational excellence, obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, you just need to keep moving. And I give this analogy a lot as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable. You can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move, not only themselves, but they move others. Like in a sense, in a nice way to, you know, refer to Benjamin Franklin with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense, as the founders of this company with folks like Rajiv and other executives and some of the newcomers, you build a culture which just keeps moving and the last 12 months you've seen some of these and obviously going back to the announcement at AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement, dead test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about, our, you know, Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally, with Azure, Google and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves we're making with some of the customers, it's gonna continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I, we're doing these, you know, dot next conferences, announcements and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months execution. So we're super excited now that this new Bain Capital investment and also the partnership, the product, we are ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon as Stu and we're gonna have more news to cover with you. Yeah, exactly right, Tarkin. I think as Tarkin said, we had the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers. There are things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud today, they're talking about, you know, fairly separate environment. Some applications running in the public cloud, some running on-premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across or that can burst from one to the other or can move around with both app and data mobility. And the possibilities are huge and it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. Well, Rajiv and Tarkin, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates. Congratulations on the progress and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. Thanks Stu. Thanks Stu. And stay with us for more coverage here from the new Tanix.next digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.