 from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering .next conference brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to NextConf, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm with Stu Miniman. This is the president's segment. Sadeesh Nihara's back. Good to see you again, Sadeesh, the president of Nutanix. And Captain Canada himself, Chad Sackage. Cube alum, good friend. Good to see you again. Hey everybody, most important thing, great .nextconf. But look, Canada Day, July 1st is right around the corner. So remember everybody, go have some poutine, drink some beers, and celebrate. There's this July 4th thing that is apparently right around there. Yeah, well it's important to us because we've ended an eight week sprint of the two. Chad Wehran, red, white, and blue, I think he's... I actually did that on purpose, you know this. Here in D.C., nice job. I figured when in D.C., you know, celebrate Americana. Why not? Well, there's a lot of celebration going on here. You guys have been celebrating several years now, what is it, two and a half years of... With the dull, yes, of a partnership. With Chad, it's relatively new, so. Okay, so... It's actually been about three years and it's been a ridiculously successful partnership. You know, I think... I would say faith-meltingly successful, but... Yeah, you know what? I agree. Okay, so coming into this role, did you have misconceptions about Nutanix? Or was that just marketing when you were kind of... No. Nutanix basically created the HCI category. They've been at it now for seven and change years. Yep. You know, great technology, very happy customers. I'd say out of the 6,200 or so Nutanix customers roughly around 2,500, 2,700 are XC customers. So I've gotten to know them really well. They tell me pretty clearly what they like about Nutanix and what they like about XC. All right, so Chad, I'm looking at my notes here and there was a guy, Chad Sackage, who said, niche corner case for VDI only. You know, that was Nutanix. Love it. You know, you're singing a little bit of a different story than we might have heard a couple of years ago. You know, I would say that it's important to acknowledge when you're wrong, Stu. You know, and I think that HCI in general has moved absolutely out of any corner case segment whatsoever. I met with a customer this morning that is basically a hospital that is running the bulk of all of their mission critical customer healthcare records, PACS, all on XC. And again, you know, I don't want to get us in trouble here at the .next conference, but we have an HCI portfolio. We see customers deploying HCI for every workload under the sun at this point. And frankly, you, I've said it publicly now firmly and as clearly as I can, SDS and HCI models are ready for the majority of X86 workloads. That's not just my opinion. It's the company. It's Dell Technologies point of view overall. You know, Joe Tucci was the master of sort of building an ecosystem with quasi competitors, competition, whatever you want to call it. And it's certainly the Dell EMC relationship of many years ago was epic. One of the probably the most successful, you know, storage relationship ever. So in, and Sidisha, you get, you know, a lot of concerns at Wall Street. Oh, when's this going to end? You guys used to get that all the time with Cisco and VC and yet you continue to. Still do. Still do. Valid questions, you know, it's the obvious place for analysts, snarky analysts to go. But in retrospect. Is there such a thing as a non snarky analyst? There are a couple, there are a couple out there. They're sitting here, right here. Yeah. You finished getting paid. After the comments that I've already got, I didn't pay to be snarky. That was fantastic, by the way. That was like watching Charlie Rose and Bill Clinton. Hard but smooth. Yeah, yeah. So if I go back into history though, I wish, I wish Mike over here and I'll ask Michael, I'll ask, I know you watch, I'll ask you next time to see you. I wonder if he had to do it all over again. If he knew now, what he, then what he knew now. If he would have just said, you know what? I'm going to do better just staying with the EMC partnership. Instead of going up and buying equal logic or a compelling and we would have done better for customers but have made, made more money. I wonder if you've learned anything from that experience. I mean, you were biased because you're on the EMC side of that. Obviously you didn't want to see Dell and that relationship. But are there similarities here? You know, I think that there's similarities but there's a notable difference. When the Dell EMC merger occurred and the first time I came out to visit headquarters and lots of discussions with sedition, with dirage, there's a core thing here that's important to understand. The market is not in a zero sum game. So if, if there's 6,200 Nutanix customers, 2,500 XC customers, roughly 3,000 VX rail customers, roughly 8,000 VSAN customers, do you know how many VNX customers there are? 300,000. Do you know how many PowerEdge servers there are out there? 27 million. We're on the earliest days of the software defined and HCI journey and frankly that's just the first step towards building hybrid clouds on-prem and off-prem that bridge one another which has been a big part of the announcements from this week. Yeah, look, I think the first part of the question you asked, you got to be honest that, you know, when you flip sometimes TV channels, let's say you come across National Geographic, right? And then there's a cheetah chasing a deer. You stop, you want to watch. You know what's going to happen. The cheetah's going to eat the deer one way or another, that's going to happen. You know it, but you want to watch it. The way we think of our industry, status quo is the cheetah. Yeah. The deer is all of us. The moment you stop innovating, that is particularly true for companies like us, young companies. The partnership that we have is not built on anything but the fact that we are adding more value for customers than what we could individually do. That's it. The sum of the parts of this should be higher than the individual parts, right? So what we have done, for example, last quarter, you're absolutely right. And when financial analysts, they'll always ask us about the Dell EMC overhang. Last quarter, for example, before the first time, publicly talked about the fact that Dell EMC business was around eight to 9% of our overall revenue. And it is not because that didn't grow. It is growing. But the overall business we are able to keep growing. Our destiny is in our hands. And it comes down to a couple of things. Our ability to really accelerate the innovation. Because as a younger company, more agile, we are expected to do more. And you saw this morning. Number two, make sure that we are playing fair. There are rules of engagement that we have. Because we know that they have a tremendous amount of portfolio and some of them will overlap. And that's okay. But you have to clearly define the rules of engagement and be very fair in how we treat the partners. And if you do those two things right, we know that this is a relationship that lasts long time. And just a quick little ad. I mean, the things that we bring is extending the platform, scale, and reach. There's no question that you're a younger company. There's no question that we're a larger company. The number of customers that say we want the better together thing and we give them that choice. It's very important for us to do that. But also add value. So whether it's integrating data protection, whether it's what we've done around running Cloud Foundry on top of XC, Home Depot talked about it. It's a great example where they want this, that all together. Now, I can't emphasize enough that what we've been trying to emphasize is be transparent, be consistent about those rules of engagement and telling our customers, driving that choice and giving them that benefit is something that we have to sustain. And it's also important to understand that if you spend this morning watching the keynote, you clearly saw that we did not talk about hyperconversion. What we talked about were two things. One is pushing that cloud intelligence to the edge and then building a hybrid cloud experience that is totally transparent. And the second thing was about building a multi-cloud environment through Khan. We did not talk about hyperconversion. Those things are not built on a platform that is not built for, you know, those things are built on a platform that is ready for a web-scale architecture. So the foundation that we have built in the last seven years is on which we are building. And as long as we continue to add value like that and partner, for example, on PCF, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, that's a classic example, Home Depot example, right? They need that same experience that they're giving to AWS. And AWS is not just doing IIS, they're doing past, they're doing the entire thing. To do that, there is no shame in figuring out what we do well, what we don't do well, understand their strengths and weakness, come together and deliver something that is better for customers. So, Tisha, I'm curious actually, because Home Depot is a, you know, lighthouse account for Pivotal on Google Cloud Platform. Talking to them about it for the last six months, you know, how does that fit in? And yeah, we know that the Dell family is a multifunction, so I'm curious to want to hear the Nutanix piece of how that fits in. I think the Google thing is a relatively new thing for us. We are expecting two different, you know, areas that we are going to partner with them. But Home Depot specifically, is that related? Because they're a big GCP customer, so maybe Tanya needs to fill it in. But this specific project is all on XE with PCF. The thing that I think is fascinating, and two watchers, I would say, for the intellectually curious that are willing to double click and go a little bit further, it's a little more of a complex nuanced story. But everyone's looking for a sound bike, whether it's in politics as we're here in DC, or whether it's in news or whatever. Home Depot, like a ton of customers, is using GCP. They're using XE, they're using vSphere, they're using NSX, they're using PCF. Like it's not like there's some singular thing. You know, another fascinating example is, I talked to a customer who's a fantastic scale IO, VXRAC flex customer, vSphere, enormous scale and scope, and when I asked them, they want a hybrid cloud to this point. HCI is just a foundation for hybrid cloud use. When I asked them, what are their hybrid cloud targets? They're like AWS, but we use GCP because we depend on TensorFlow. It is, we live in a world which you need to expand your mind and not naturally create this like binary A, B thing. It's a multi-cloud world, Chad. So it's a multi-stack, multi-cloud, multi-use case world. An energy news mess in IT that we've been dealing with. So another thing that analysts do a lot is give unsolicited advice. So I want to do that and maybe get your reaction. So Amazon's operating profits are roughly, almost double what EMC's were, Amazon Web Services when EMC was a public company. Massive change and disruptive force in our industry. And frankly, if it weren't for AWS, we wouldn't be where we are today as fast as we were. So I see your joint challenge as fulfilling the vision of what we call true private cloud, substantially mimicking the cloud experience on-prem. And you're behind, and you know you're behind at that because Amazon's, by definition, in the lead. So your challenge as we see it is to create that experience and create that automation and allow people to shift their labor costs to the fun stuff. By the way, I agree and I accept that advice. You can answer for you, but I'll tell you, we've been trying to, so we started with the first enterprise hybrid cloud efforts, almost three and a half years ago. And they're enormous, and at the time we said, and deploy it on anything you want. And you know what, we had very limited success with that. And the reason we had limited success wasn't because we didn't get the customer going, yes, I want to have a hybrid cloud where I can bridge and connect to multiple different public cloud targets. That idea, dead right. The idea of you can build it any way you want, wrong. Then we said, okay, you know what? CI is a simplification. We realize is that life-cycling CI stacks along with a CMP layer, whether it's inside an integrated thing or whether it's directly adjacent, still too complex. The latest is basically all of our hybrid cloud, whether it's destined towards enterprise IaaS or Paz on-prem, runs on HCI, when? Always, because HCI is fundamentally orders of magnitude easier to deploy, to scale, to version, et cetera, et cetera. What I've been seeing over the last 24 hours about basically the calm acquisition becoming part of Acropolis is the example where Nutanix is taking it, where they're trying to build it into the calm and Acropolis stack. I think that's a common vision between the two companies. What you will hear from HP or Cisco or EMC or Nutanix, the picture isn't going to change much because we all know what the blueprint looks like. I think the real question is, how do you get there? How you do that is where the difference is going to be, and the advantage we have is that because we built every stack with that clean architecture in mind, the north star being, we have to deliver a fully-automatable stack. We have a sort of an added advantage of building every step connect naturally to the next step. So for example, our metadata structure, our storage fabric, our virtualization fabric, our automation fabric on calm, and how we are introducing XI as a hybrid cloud service, it is all controlled from Prism. And that Prism itself and Prism Central are fully distributed. So that ability to deploy this at scale across multiple continents and manage it, that is very similar to how Amazon, the reason why Amazon can deliver, you know, a millisecond billing on Lambda stack is not because they are taking 10 different products. They have technology that is built to deliver that level of granularity. So again, I agree, but there's an element that I disagree. Calm was an acquisition. Calm was an acquisition of people and talent to basically extend up into the IaaS, chargeback, billing, self-service portal domain. No disrespect of the decision technology architecture, right? You've done obviously great progress that you've shown to the market the last two days about how you're integrating that in your stack. We've been at this now for four years, and we've looked at how do we need to keep evolving our own Dell technology stacks. Again, it's not an either or. So for example, we do multi-site PCF deployments directly on top of a HCI target that has total lifecycle, completely distributed stack, and the pivotal Google work around Kubernetes coming as part of Pivotal, which echoes a lot of the Kubernetes becoming part of your stack as well. Kubo highlights what we're all trying to do towards that target. Again, I think that the natural tendency because people like to see car races to watch for crashes, cheetahs chasing lions. Or something like that. We're all striving to do what you said. The customer demand for simple to operate, simple to deploy, simple to scale, turnkey, IaaS, Paz, and even SaaS stacks that are a hybrid deployment model, that is a fact. How customers need to evaluate all the choices in the marketplace is again, who does it best? And if you don't, you're the deer, is your point of view. You're the lion of the deer. I wish we had more time, guys. I'll give you both the last word. Chad, you're everywhere this week and everywhere every week, but final thoughts. Final thoughts, I mean, customers can know that we're committed to customer choice. We're committed to this partnership. The number of customers in revenue continues to grow. Our point of view is that we've got a portfolio approach, but no one should be confused about what that means. That means that we're committed to the partnership. Customers, I've talked to a lot of them here. They're happy. Never punch your customer in the face and never punch yourself in the face. Simple strategy from Chad Sackatch. My point is very simple. I think this is a partnership that is working. The company is run by really smart people. I don't think we are interested in doing anything that is going to make our customers' decision a wrong one for them. And we are committed. We are committed to innovate and we are committed to service the joint customers together. Thank you. Guys, you know, you guys make this job fun. Thank you so much for coming on the tube. Really appreciate it. Guys, remember, happy Canada Day. All right, July 1st. Love it. All right, keep it right there. Everybody be back with our next guest right after this short break.