 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to Washington D.C., everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is day two of our coverage of .NEXT, Nutanix. NextConf, hashtag NextConf. Wendy M. Pfeiffer is here. She's the relatively new CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, you got my attention. You said there's a reason for it. Reason for the M. For the M. Yeah, absolutely. It's my mom's middle initial. Her middle name is Michelle. My middle name is Michelle. And my 10-year-old daughter, Holly's middle name is Michelle. And we sort of pass along our female heritage. So I send Holly a message whenever I do anything publicly that it's a shout out to her. She gets to lead. She gets to be proud of her feminine heritage as well as her family heritage. I love that. That is fantastic. I got to, okay, quick aside, I got to make you laugh. We're at the racetrack one day and it was this one guy and he was winning and I wasn't winning. So I said, how are you just like the eighth race? How are you doing this? Well, his last name began with an M. He goes, I'm just betting on all the horses with an M in it. There you go. That could be another good reason. Thanks for the tip. Anyway, welcome to theCUBE and welcome to Nutanix. Five months in on the job. You got a really strong IT background. GoPro, Yahoo, both companies have senior leadership. Robert Half, I think was on the resume as well. Yeah, Cisco systems, Exodus, communications. Okay, so you've seen it all. This means I'm old. I've been around a long time. Any company, I would work anywhere. So what's the experience been like at Nutanix? Tell us about sort of the onboarding. It is a playground. I love it, Nutanix. I was hoping that they would have the technology that I love and they do. So it's one of the first places I've worked where it sort of doesn't matter if I need server storage. We have that, it's pretty cool. I have a really amazing team and then the leadership there is fantastic. It's also the first time in my career where I'm working for a company that sells to CIOs. And so my opinion of our product matters. I get to be customer number one, drink our champagne, that sort of thing. In fact, I'm on that path. We call it eat your own dog food. When I came on board and I said, I don't want the dog food. We're going to be drinking our own champagne. I want the good stuff. So I'm getting to sort of play and just experience the product and experience that process. And then people care what I think. People who are developing product care what I think. And that's great. Are the sales guys dragging you into situations? They are totally dragging me into situations. I'm not that compelling in direct sales but I have been giving them some tips on how to sell to CIOs and just kind of letting them know how to approach us and some of the things that we care about and don't care about. But what's great as well is I'm not very good at being fake. So when I talk about using our product and when I'm excited about our product, it's just pretty, it's genuine. If I don't like something, you know that too. Well, CIOs, I mean, you're part of a network. We are. And that network is sort of immutable. It's a secret cabal. It really is. We get together in tree houses and kind of exchange the password and yeah. But there's a code, right? I mean, you're not going to give another, one of your peers some bad advice even if you are a CIO of a company that's trying to sell to them, right? That's right. It's a small circle. I do belong to some groups that get together and talk about some of our common challenges. And one of our cardinal rules is that no vendors are allowed and there's no selling. We do, you know, if we have some expertise, we'll share that, but we really don't cross that line. And so, you know, when I do give advice, they know it's genuine as much as possible. So Wendy, we always like to ask CIOs, you know, what's challenging you today? You know, typical IT, we always said for years, it was like, okay, you know, your head count next year is going to be flat, your budget's going to be declining. You know, what do you see and when you're talking to your peers? What are some of the biggest challenges that they say? Yeah, it's a few things. One thing is the transformation that's happening around digital technologies and moving into the cloud. It's requiring a transformation of skill sets as well. And so, we really have a challenge, you know, first of all, in deciding if we have traditional IT folks, how do we transform their skill sets? How do you make an infrastructure guy or gal someone who writes code? So that's one thing and just a dearth of talent. There aren't enough people entering the workforce. That's one thing. Another thing is really just about the pace of innovation. And, you know, by nature, when you sort of get to a senior executive level, you're almost less innovative than you might have originally been, but we're supposed to be the, you know, paragons of innovation and new ideas. And so we struggle with that. We struggle to kind of keep it fresh and reinvent ourselves. And, you know, I left a fairly traditional career to go to GoPro just because of those, that desire to reinvent myself and try something hard and new. So we've got that struggle as well. I think as well, just the changing business models to, you know, there's a lot, we're always balancing CapEx, OpEx. A lot of us have a big investment in OpEx and in SaaS and then, you know, trying to balance that with CapEx. So we've always got those challenges. I think that's a lot of it. Wendy, we're 10 years into kind of this journey of what cloud and how it's going to affect it. And the role of the CIO is something that's been kind of in the center of it. Does the CIO become, you know, irrelevant? Does it become a broker of services? You talked a little bit about some of the changing roles. How was your viewpoint on cloud? Has it changed over the last few years and some of your different roles? And, you know, I'm curious inside of Nutanix, you know, how public cloud fits into, you know, what you use. I think there's a couple of layers. One layer that doesn't go away is operations. And so whether it's taking operational expertise and transforming that into code for DevOps or whether it's transforming it into process for on-premise infrastructure, you know, you have to have that knowledge and you have to have that leadership. So I don't think the need for leadership is ever really going away. I think the center of leadership is changing, you know, over time and has sort of moved from place to place. But ultimately we have to have folks who understand how to build whatever it is to scale, who understand how to flex, who understand how to deal with crisis. And then also there are some fundamentals towards architecture and building blocks. And, you know, yes, we're architecting differently. We're architecting with code in the cloud. But the principles underline those things are relatively the same. So I don't think that the functions, the need for leadership is going away at all, but I do think that we have to be flexible in our thinking. And I think I will say the title CIO is it's actually never kind of been right, you know, and we're chief digital officer, chief AWS officer. All of those things are sort of not exactly right. And we need to sort of not be so precious about titles and just go back to thinking and leading and innovating and let the titles take care of themselves. Okay, so I got to still ask you about, you know, this emergent role of the chief data officer. All right. And so we can all agree data is important. Whatever bromide you want to use, data is the new oil and so forth and so on. And many of the chief data officers that we've talked to are, you know, individuals that maybe do a lot of governance. A lot of things that CIOs generally aren't responsible for. Yet at the same time, data is becoming this new competitive advantage. And it's so important to information technology. What are your thoughts on data helping companies become data driven? And what is the role of the CIO in that context? First of all, data is really, really important and how a company deals with its data is a gigantic differentiator. And so obviously we have all this opportunity in the areas of machine learning and potentially AI and so on. When I was at Yahoo, one of the things I worked on was our privacy initiatives. And you know, even back then, we had the ability to ingest a lot of data about our users and we had the ability algorithmically to do behavioral targeting. But we had to make some ethical decisions and some compliance decisions about how we used that data. And so, you know, the technology has been available for some time. But where we haven't caught up is in policy. I think that chief data officer is really at the nexus of creating policy, understanding capabilities and deciding how we apply those things. And we've always needed that role. Sometimes it's the CIO, sometimes it's the chief privacy officer. We've always needed that role. But the role is a little bit different, I think, with data because of the power of the data. So I do think there's a need for some knowledge of the law. GDPR is coming down from Europe and there's a key factor there. But ultimately, data needs to be treated like an asset. It's product as much as anything else. So I think someone who's akin to a chief product officer needs to handle the company's data. And that data needs to imbue the product. It needs to imbue go-to-market plans. It also can be a reflection of the culture of the company as well. So even collecting data on ourselves and how we operate and how our employees move through their cycles is very, very powerful. Always with ethics, though. And that's the thing that if you leave data in the hands of pure engineers or pure technologists, then you need some sorts of checks and balances as well. Because sometimes we're overcome by the possibilities of the technology without thinking through the possibilities that affect human beings. And so we need that balance. I've always felt like the CIO is the sort of field general and should be implementing the data strategy. But he or she shouldn't be necessarily responsible for, okay, how are we going to monetize the data? Who has access to data? What are the data policies? That seems like a full-time job. But there is overlap, though. Well, it's messy, right? And a lot of times it has to do with, I mean, at that C-level, those are all board-level positions, right? So ultimately, we're responsible for the financial health of the company at that level. And so really, we're playing to our strengths. Sometimes we come to the table and we understand how to monetize data. Sometimes we come to the table and we know how to efficiently manage operations. And there's usually a mix, right? There's somebody with a CTO or a CPO or a CIO title or a chief data officer title. But it's less about the title and more about those strengths that show up around the executive table. But there needs to be somebody or maybe a combination of a couple of somebodies who are hungry for the value that they can derive from that data and accrue that to value to the company. It's some notion of swim lanes for accountability, but recognizing there's some overlap. We got to talk about women in tech, but go ahead. Just two things, Wendy. Do you know the Simon girl? Yeah, as a technology leader, I'm curious if you see differences between yourself being a technology leader in Silicon Valley and those outside the Valley in the second one. Just curious if you've had any learnings working now for a company that sells to the enterprise versus being on the consumer side of the house at GoPro and some of the others. Yeah, Silicon Valley is a bubble. And we all breathe our own oxygen. We think we're pretty cool. We tend to be libertarian as a group and therefore we have libertarian policies that are embodied in how we develop code, how we create products. And we're creating our own little culture, but we're not in sync with a lot of the rest of the world. Luckily, one of the pieces of our culture is about building things that are open and so people can repurpose our technologies in ways that make sense for them. And the other thing is even more profound is the effect of millennials on both Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley. Millennials are changing how we develop code, how we organize our companies, et cetera. And your other question, can't remember. Consumer versus selling to the enterprise. Oh, you know, I think the difference really is just internally my job was a, it was a different sport working for a consumer company because people weren't generally smarter than me around my technology in the consumer company, but they are a lot smarter than me. I am not the technical expert in the room at Nutanix. All of them know more than I do, right? I'll bet, no offense, but I'll bet. I know, right? And that was a little intimidating. I had to think twice. Do I want to go back to being a junior high? So we're going to ask you your journey. 17% of the IT industry's employment comprises women. Just so happens that 17% of the guests in the cube are women and we really try and go overboard on it. So there's a clear disparity in pay. It's well documented. What was your journey to get here? It's only now that I'm old and wise and at a senior level that people are making a big thing about me being female. I've been female my entire career. Never heard of it. I never traded on it. I will tell you that throughout my career, I have been given advice that would seem ridiculous if it were given to a male. As an example, I've been told that I used too many words, that I'm too emotional, that I should, I've been told, you know, you're, you know, can you imagine if I said, you know, hey, Bob, you know, could you button up that top button of your shirt there? And when you sit down, don't spread your legs because I am drawn to looking at, you know, girls, women, we get that advice from senior advisors. We're told be less emotional. I've always ignored that advice. I am a mom. I'm, you know, I have like the blonde 1980s hair. I mean, there's not much I can do about that. And so, you know, being genuinely myself, it was all I could figure out how to be. And it just so happens that now I'm in my 50s and I'm a CIO. And so suddenly that's a thing. But it's never, it's never been a thing. It's been something where my entire career, I've had to just keep my own counsel and be genuine. And the fact that I'm female and feminine and a mom doesn't diminish the fact that I'm also a brilliant technologist that I'm good at leading people. I can feel empathy and, you know, care in my heart for a person at the same time that I'm firing them for non-performance. So I can be multifaceted. And I think that's women's superpower. And I think when we try to be just one thing or we try to be more like the traditional male in leadership, then it's sort of like walking onto, you know, being Jerry Rice and walking onto the field with like, you know, your legs tied together. You know, my unfair advantage, you know, to quote John Madden, like, I got to use my unfair advantage. And my unfair advantage is that I think in a multifaceted way. Wendy M, thanks so much for coming. I'm glad we could make time for you and glad you could make time for us. Thank you. Thank you, appreciate it, it was fun. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back to wrap. This is theCUBE in DC at Nutanix.next, right back.