 from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to .NEXT everybody inside the district, kind of, this is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're with theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of NextConf. Aditya Sood is here, he's the director of senior director of engineering and product at Nutanix and Benny Gill, who is the chief architect at the company. Gentlemen, welcome to see you. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. So you guys had the great keynote. It was, I love how D. Raj interacts with you on the stage, asked you these Colombo questions, even though he's deep knowledge of what's going on. It's really quite good, but Benny, let me start with you. So first of all, what's the show like this year? You know, we've been, now this is our third year doing Next, we've seen quite an evolution. From your standpoint, from the hardcore product side, what are you seeing? I think it's exciting to be here. This year, we're seeing almost every year doubling of the attendance in the conference and also the excitement that we hear from our Nutanix technical champions and our customers is a lot more visceral in terms of how much we are doing, in terms of vision and mission. And as we are executing on our vision that has always been, you know, are you sure you can do it kind of thing? But as we deliver every year, there's more conviction that we are seeing from all these people here. So it's really exciting. But D. Raj, I wonder if you could talk about calm a little bit, I mean, it's your baby. And people say calm, I'm calm. Who's going to the joke going around today? What is calm? So calm is many things at once, but most of all it's a control plane at the application layer. How do you build this multi-cloud, hybrid cloud technology together and manage the entire life cycle, you know? Compliance, governance, provisioning, costing, visibility, all of these things together. And Aditya, there's many companies that have attacked this challenge. Why did you, when you help Co-Find and Found Calm, think that you could address this and bring us up to speed as to the acquisition last year. What has been, being part of Nutanix, what did that do to the product itself to lead us to today? I think, addressing the first part of your question, why we think this is different, right? Many people have tried to do these blueprints and these things over the many decades. Automation's been around. But I think this is fundamentally 10x to 100x better because of the logical approach we're taking, the data model we have built, which models applications, and tries to keep the logical layer separate from the physical layer or the virtual layer. The second part of the Nutanix integration was homecoming. This was, I mean practically nothing changed from our point of view, except that we got, became part of a much bigger family, a lot of warmth there, a lot of technical goodness, a lot of, I would say, systems level and platform goodness that got leveraged in. So it's been all pretty great. For the last, say what, nine months or so? All right, Vinny, want to get your viewpoint. Of course Nutanix has been growing its ecosystem. We've got a big expo hall with a lot of partners there. What were the goals that you wanted to make sure you hit by the time we came to this show with Calm to kind of meet your customers in this growing ecosystem? Yeah, I think what we're looking at is explaining how we're building an operating system. An operating system is a platform for running applications. And now the platform for running applications is in fact changing. Earlier it used to be Linux and Windows, now it's Clouds, Cloud is an OS. And when you talk about building OSes, it's about ecosystem, it's about the drivers, it's about the partners that build stuff for you. Calm is a way of inviting them to a marketplace. The repository for where you put your stuff. Calm is also your yum in an app get tool. You know, one click deployment of any application. The more simple you make it, more developers will be attracted to your operating system. So the message here is look, we are developing a marketplace, bringing Calm to the picture, giving you an operating system that can run on any hardware, hardware meaning any cloud, any hypervisor and so on. How much can I ask, how much, how much did that one click, if you think about the life cycle of what has to occur in that one click. And then by the way, everything else that you don't do, how much time do you think you're saving people? I mean, take database as a service. Yes, one click, but then you got to do regression testing, you got to do some recovery testing, but you're taking away a lot of the planning, presumably, do you have any sense as to, if it takes a hundred, how much you just shaved off with one click? Yeah, I mean, Aditya's the best person to answer that question. His team has been working on this for seven years. And this is something that again, touching back on what Calm does differently, that it understands that provisioning your application is only the beginning of your problems. You have an application, now you got to grow it, scale it, it's going to blow up, you need to upgrade it, test it, certify it and all that stuff. And that's where the application life cycle management part comes in. As a rough estimate, I would say, at least 70 to 80% of the complexity has gone away. There is still some complexity, because there is an essential complexity in every problem. Cannot reduce it beyond that. Right, say, off the ballpark, 70, 80? I like that number. So I've kind of baited you. The practitioner that we had on today said at least, at least, and he's being conservative because that's what IT guys do, he said at least 50%. So we can fairly say, let's say 50 to 70%, you've just taken off the table, so he can now focus on higher quality testing, recovery, and even in the fun stuff, as Stu likes to say. Absolutely, and Aditya, there was a joke in the keynote that this is not an app store. So what do you see, the one click obviously is a critical piece, but how is this different from, think of the Amazon marketplace or other, we've talked about do we need an enterprise app store? How is this different? How do customers perceive this? What early feedback have you been getting? I think one of the problems that we are trying to solve and how we are looking at it is every platform, let's say every public cloud, every private cloud, they have some amount of tooling and automation already built in. But from a customer point of view, these are all just different independent silos. So if you go look at any, you look at the AWS marketplace, it's for AWS only. And what we are trying to do is, this is means to an end. I'm running five different kind of infrastructure stacks. I want a single app store for my consumers internally. My business user doesn't care where the application is provisioned as long as we can drive them the rise SLAs and cost ROI for their internal application. You know what's important about this? I wonder if we could sort of riff on it for a bit. So we weren't the first to say this, I think it was probably Benioff, that more non-tech companies will be SaaS companies than tech companies. So that says that they need a stack to build their SaaS. So that marketplace that you showed, you had Cassandra and Mongo, Mike Sequel and Redis and TensorFlow and all these tools that will allow a SaaS provider to build their own stack. So I wonder if we could talk about this a little bit in terms of the vision of the next generation company, not just tech company, and how you see yourselves fitting into that as an enabler, comments. I think as an analogy, I like to think how the electronics industry evolved. And back in the 70s and 80s, the semiconductor explosion happened. And any kind of functionality that I wanted, I looked up the catalog, I looked at the cost, the yield rates, the functionality that chip provided. I just went and bought those chips and I plugged them in and I built my bigger appliance out of it. And this is how I think that this is going to evolve. That we are going to just move the level of abstraction while in higher level, have these reusable fundament components, compose them together, and have a faster time to market. I mean, as an application developer, do I really need to understand how MongoDB scales and how it's provisioned and how it's backed up and everything. I want a single API or a one-click experience equivalent in my view to just plug it into my application and then go on from there. And then take this my application and deliver it as a unit to my user, which can then go ahead and just like Lego blocks, keep building higher and higher layers of functionality. Yeah, Aditya brought up a key point there with APIs, right? Anytime an OS is developed, after some point you have to talk about what is the standardization of APIs on top of this OS? Like POSIX was a standard of APIs in an operating system. This new cloud operating system is actually asking for a standardization of APIs so that the applications built on top of it can enjoy a guaranteed stable API that will be portable across various hardware and clouds. We are seeing the beginning of that kind of API with the work that Aditya's team is doing around App Blueprints, App Lifecycle, that's coming to the fore right now. All right, Aditya, one of the things I usually hear after a company gets acquired by a bigger company is just the amount of feedback they get from the customers. Nutanix is a little bit self-selecting, customers usually that are looking to try something different. What's been your experience with the Nutanix customer base? How has that impacted or shifted where you were looking to drive the product? It has certainly informed the product roadmap, but I wouldn't say it has fundamentally changed it because one of the key things and one of the great things about Nutanix is that we are building open systems which is why even in the keynote that you saw, when we are going and provisioning an application, we are not saying this is Nutanix only. We are treating each of the compute platform at an independent, equivalent level. And that was our vision right from the start, that bring the goodness at the top layer and then leverage some deep platform stuff. We can obviously will work best on Nutanix because we get underlying data from the storage systems, our virtualization systems and go run on that. But yeah, fundamentally it has not really changed anything. Ambitious. Yeah, Vinny, the question I have for you is if I look at the public clouds, they all want to own the applications in one way or another. Google's probably a little bit more open, but Microsoft, lots of business apps, Amazon, the next generation apps, how does Nutanix look at that app ownership? Obviously come from the infrastructure side, but how does your viewpoint differ from some other clouds? Our viewpoint is more like how players like Apple look at owning the app. I mean, you have an app store or a marketplace, but that is sort of democratic. I do have my own apps. I could have my mail app, my camera app, but I am neutral in the sense that I enable others to create a better app if they can because it only helps my platform. So we are in the business of creating the best in class operating system. We're calling it enterprise cloud operating system, and then enabling that cloud operating system to run on any form factor, any hypervisor, hardware, or going all the way to the edge, as you might have talked to others in this conference, our cloud operating system can run on a single node now, down from three nodes to two nodes to one node to an Intel node in a drone. That is where we're going, enable everybody, and now on these various form factors, different applications would run. I would say a small fraction of the applications that are key to most customers to get to 80% of their simple use cases might come from us, but a majority of the use cases would come from outside, and eventually we look at this as we primarily building the OS and the world building an app store or marketplace on top of us. All right, Gents, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure seeing you again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from NextConf in DC. We'll be right back.