 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next. We are here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with Stu Miniman. We are joined by Nikola Bozenevich. He is the VP GM Desktop Services at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Also, Yupp Piskar, who is an industry analyst and a many time guest on theCUBE. That's right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you are actually the founder of Frame. And Frame was bought by Nutanix about a year ago. So tell us a little bit about the acquisition. How its acquisitions are challenging. How has it been going? It's been a great year. There's no better place than Nutanix to do end user computing in VDI. And that's what Frame was all about. How we make it simple. That was also all about Nutanix. How do you make computing simple, fast, delightful? And we've done so many things to really bridge that world of on-prem and cloud of traditional legacy VDI like Citrix and VMware on hyper-converged infrastructure and now new broker like Frame. And we are really looking at that as one end user computing team and just do what's right for the customer. So it's been a blast. Nicola, last year when we had you on we talked a lot about Frame. So you've got a broader mandate now to do the whole desktop services. Give us your view of the landscape a little bit out there. Definitely I understand VDI traditionally, boy was it complicated. Building that stack, the infrastructure and the software pieces. Where are your customers today? And how's the industry doing it a whole on that modernization journey? As I said, it's been a great 12 months. If you're in VDI, a lot of people who are in the traditional VDI world with brokers like Citrix and VMware are looking to modernize their data centers and there is no better options than hyper-converged and Nutanix to have bite size and linearly scaled infrastructures around VDI. We continue to innovate. We continue to work closely with the vendors, especially Citrix. And at the same time as the focus is shifting to the public cloud, we are having our own opinion on how the broker in the public cloud should look like with Frame and then mixing and matching where the desktops really are and really looking at very industry and vertical specific use cases. We're seeing a lot of new adoption in healthcare and financial services and with Frame we're seeing a lot of new use cases in education and public sector as well. And Yup, is this jiving with what you see in terms of the way they're positioning themselves and what you're hearing from your sources in the market? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, given the trend that applications are going into the cloud, it makes sense to pick up those applications that are harder to virtualize, harder to move to the cloud and find a way to bring them to the cloud as well, to bring that cloud-like experience for the older applications as well. And then the other hand, there's the simplicity of running the older desktops, the traditional VDI. Just like Stu said, I mean, it's difficult to set up that whole environment to manage it, to make sure it continues to operate and then to have something that kind of replaces that with a simple solution. I mean, that's what customers are looking for. Yeah. Nicola, some of the conversations I had years ago was, it's not even desktop. It's about my applications. It's about my users. It's about how things are changing there. In today's world, where many customers are trying to do SaaS first, how do you, I guess, reframe that conversation of what was, we spent over a decade with that VDI discussion? Look, I think we're going to end up, when it comes to infrastructure and when it comes to virtualization, we're going to come up somewhere in the middle where not everything's going to be public cloud and everything's going to be on-prem. It's going to be somewhere in the middle. It comes to application delivery versus full desktops. It started, obviously, with app virtualization, but more and more people are looking at delivering full desktop solutions. There is a great benefit to it. Consistent performance, isolation and security or some things that come to mind. And we are now able to deliver great performance. Look at Windows 10, which is a big migration. We can deliver great Windows 10 performance using Citrix or using Frame, and for example, some innovation that NVIDIA is bringing to market with virtualizing GPUs. So for the longest time, it was a niche and now it's becoming more of a mainstream. If you just want your desktop to be scrolling smoothly, you probably need your GPU. So I think that's where VDI and simplicity of VDI really takes over. So you are talking about speed and security. What about design? How does that play into it? What kind of Nutanix is all about data delivery, design and delight? And I think with end user computing, it's end user for a reason. It's experienced by a user. It's experienced by an administrator. And at the end of the day, best user experience is going to win. So for administrators, if they can install their applications and manage them in one click, that's a great benefit. And that's what we bring with combination of hybrid converged and Frame. Same goes for end user experience as opposed to let's say 10 years ago when everybody was on a wired network. These days people work from anywhere. They work from Starbucks, they work over and allows the seller a connection. So it's very important to have that user experience be delightful. And that's something that we're very focused on. Yeah, you, I think I've had so many discussions this year about kind of the CX, the customer experience, as well as the employee experience. So I would think that this whole EUC discussion ties well in it. What are you hearing from them and seeing out there? So, you know, the whole discussion about experience, I think it's really important. I mean, employees have to do their job. They are given the tools to do the job, but sometimes the tools they're given are slightly older. They may not be modern. They may not be web based. They may not be performant. So the issue is how do you, you know, in a very specific niche, in a very specific use case, how do you make sure that the older application will actually continue running, right? How do you bring that, you know, Windows application into a framework where you can actually work with it everywhere on any device, right? And that's kind of where I see the wish for a good employee experience cannot be broken down by the technical limitations of what applications can do, right? And the issue is, you know, not every application is cloud native. Not every application runs in the cloud. So you have to have something that kind of bridges that gap between, you know, on the one hand, what you want to offer to the employee, and the other hand, what you're kind of forced to use in specific use cases. There's just no other way than, you know, using that old Windows application. Yeah. Nikolai, once again, I think back to some of the years of talking about VDI deployments and it was like, oh, well, organizationally, we're now have to have the desktop team versus the server team and the storage people need to get involved. You brought a customer to come talk to the analysts yesterday and they didn't, they were like, we don't want to worry about any of this. We want to worry about our application and what's going on. So help explain a little bit, kind of some of the transformational potential of the new model. It's almost the same way we can hyperconverge compute and storage and hypervisor. We're hyperconverging all these different roles from the storage role to the IT role to the business role where, to be honest, you don't need three separate people or three separate teams to do it. Solutions like Frame, for example, make it possible to do that from a single pane of glass and to manage it all. So the customer that we had yesterday is doing that thing exactly. You know, it's not going even to their IT. In some cases, like a customer we're going to have to more a Vodafone that is there on hyperconverged still has a lot more than what I'd call a legacy. It's 5,000 applications delivered to 50,000 concurrent users and they're just doing a new refresh. So it's here to stay, VDI is here to stay. Upe, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing the companies like Nutanix, particularly in this space? So, I mean, the biggest challenge is going to be integration, right? I mean, Nutanix is becoming a big company. It's up to, I don't know, 5,500 people, I think. It's a big company, it's a lot of products. You know, the portfolio's expanding. And so making sure that all of those solutions fit into the portfolio. And again, coming back to that experience, right? So can Nutanix deliver a solution for many different problems within the data center and in the enterprise cloud without it seeming to be, you know, different products that are not integrated where the user experience is bad. I mean, we've all been there, where you try to run a data center and you get bogged down with all of the details, simply because the products that you use are not integrated. So I think, you know, from a Nutanix perspective, making sure that everything's integrated and works well with all of the other products in the portfolio, that's going to be the big challenge for the next year. You know, Nicola, we had Dura John this morning and he talked about those experiences. You know, customers shouldn't have to worry, oh my gosh, you know, I looked on the slide and there's 30 different Nutanix products and I can't even spell all of them, you know. So tell us a little bit about integrating frame through and making sure desktop just becomes, you know, a piece of that experience. The big switch for us has been thinking about solutions, not products, for that same reason, because there are so many products right now in the portfolio. And these are computing, or VDI, has been one of the key solutions that we are focusing on in the next 12 and 24 months. So what that really means is that all the products are designed to work seamlessly. So it starts with your hyper-converged, with Citrix as a broker, Horizon as a broker, Frame as a broker, but it extends way beyond that. So talking about files, you obviously need your enterprise file server that is very, very seamlessly integrated with the end-user computing solution. Same goes for Flow. You can now have boundaries of who can access VMs or now we have identity-based micro-segmentation. And then things like Beam, where you can seamlessly, again, have one-click integration and know how much is something costing you right now and how much the same workload would cost you if you ran it on-prem or on a different cloud. So I think all of these things are designed to work seamlessly and we spend a ton of time. I mean literally a ton of time to get together with all the teams and to make sure that user experience is as seamless as possible. So I want to go deeper into your past when at the age of 22 you helped lead a revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. I want to know the lessons that you learned as a revolutionary and how you apply them to the technology industry today. I mean, because there was a lot of, you know, move fast and break things, which is what you were doing then. You know, so like I spoke to a group of executives last night and mentioned those times in the 90s, I grew up in Serbia where the rest of the world was going for dot-com boom. We were dealing with basically Yugoslavia breaking apart and in 96 from a pretty anonymous student in a crowd after Milosevic has stolen an election, I became the leader of what was a very natural but also very authentic movement. Within four weeks I was sitting with him just like this, negotiating with about 100,000 people yelling and screaming under his window and he had to reverse the results of his election fraud. It took another couple of years and we got rid of him. The lesson that I learned at a very young age and just, you know, things just happened was that if you do things in an authentic way, if you speak with conviction at the right time, you know, there are no things that you can do and that was probably the revolutionary spirit that Nutanik shares when I met Dheeraj that, you know, everything's possible, that incumbency is not insurmountable and that's what led me to move to the US, go to my grad school, get PhD, start a couple of companies and looking back, I'm in my mid-40s right now, it's pretty crazy to looking at the odds and what it takes to build a company, make it successful and how risky that is. Just going through some of these experiences when I was in my early 20s certainly helped me and I think we live in the day and age where the risk is probably overestimated and that we should probably all take more risk in the modern day and age. The gain is potentially very large and the risk is relatively small. Oh, that's great, but then the timing is everything too. Timing is everything and I know that was a fall of 96, 20 something years ago and I remember the biggest lesson that I learned if we've done exactly the same thing and we've done it 10 times better, six months before or six months after, it wouldn't happen. It was really the right moment and the right wave of underlying energy that if you serve that way, the right way, you can move mountains but it's really important to have a clear message to do it with conviction and to do it at the right time. Right, so it's a little bit of luck but then also the willingness to take a risk. Absolutely. Excellent, well thank you so much, you and Nicola, it was a pleasure talking to you both. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more coming up tomorrow from Nutanix.next.