 from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Minimanu with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program Ben Gibson, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Nutanix. Ben, nice to have you on. You're third time now on theCUBE. Couple more, you get one of those VIP badges on our website. You get to be a really good habit and I'm really enjoying it. Thanks for having me here. Well, thank you. And you and Keith share something in common. This is the first time you've been to a .NEXT Conference. So I've had the pleasure of actually being at every single one of the U.S. and Europeans. Haven't done the .NEXT on tours, but give us your impression so far as to, you know, you're heavily involved, but of the show. You know, I have to say, it's lived up to all of my expectations and more. I talked about this this morning, the first .NEXT back in 2015. You were there, it was in Miami. We had a little over 800 people. Today we had 5,500 registered to be here and it's a thrill to see that many of our best customers and partners come together. And for me too, being new to this company, I've been here almost six months now. It really brings home the level of energy and loyalty and excitement that we've engendered within our customer base. It's palpable and what better way to experience that live than here in New Orleans. Yeah, as we say, a lot of shows like this, there's sometimes it's like, well, I've got all the true believers here. But you know, there's good customers here. They're poking, they're prodding, they're trying, but they are big fans of the product. Any kind of key things, interactions you've had so far? Yeah, you know, I've had a lot of conversations with customers here and I am picking up on some common themes. One of them is moving more and more of tier one applications onto Nutanix. And that's very exciting for us. You know, in our early days, it was all about VDI and that was the sweet spot workload. And now we're starting to see more and more Oracle and SAP and other major tier one applications being deployed over Nutanix. And customers are excited to do that because we've made things so much more radically simple for them in terms of the infrastructure that is being run upon, so to speak, right? And so that's certainly a key thing that we're hearing. Yeah, one of the things I took out of your opening at the keynote is that we talk about how much change there is in the industry. But in some ways it's a challenge, but another way it's really an opportunity for customers to go through their transformations, change their businesses and prove their careers. What's Nutanix's positioning? Yeah, first of all, my first and Nutanix's first position on this is dot next. We see as a place where IT professionals can come, they can learn, they can share, get certified, but also help them position themselves for all this change that's happening in the industry, public cloud, right? If you're managing and building infrastructure, or are you renting it? And we think there's a really interesting opportunity for those who have built to become those who advise and lead as everything moves to be a more hybrid cloud scenario out there. And so I think that's the opportunity that we have and this show is about how do you empower our attendees to go back out and be that strategic counselor to build the right type of data center the way they've always wanted to do and be that broker almost between different clouds. And that's a lot about what you heard Sunil talk about today. So Ben, one of the things that I've heard consistently from customers over the past couple of days, Nutanix, humble, Nutanix, not entitled. You're the chief storyteller at Nutanix. How did you get that message out without eliminating kind of the core of that message? I mean, that's great to hear when I'm here at the show. But how do you expand that message out to the greater audience? That's a great question. It's something I think about every day and every night. And for us, we talk about our core values about being hungry, humble and honest. And I really think we live up to that. I think how do we get out that persona who we are as a company out to the broader marketplace? We have a lot of great early adopter customers. And now as we move and as hyper-convergence and everything we're doing moves more into Main Street with candidly more conservative customers that may not be ready to try the brand new, then we do have to get that story out there more. So one big way we do it, just this week we've launched our new brand campaign around freedom. Freedom to build, freedom to run the applications where you want to run them. Freedom to choose the right cloud platform that suits your needs. And so a big thing we're doing this week is we're rolling out this campaign. And who better to unveil that to first than our best and brightest and most loyal customers here at Dotnext? Yeah, expand on that freedom campaign. It definitely, it struck me when I landed at the airport here in New Orleans. And I believe it's build, run, cloud, invent and play. Some of those themes I've heard in the past, I remember the first Dotnext conference it was Nutanix gave me my weekends back. And then, you know, went a little bit, Nutanix enabled me to, you know, go to that security project that I couldn't do before. So why the freedom brand? What, you know, what do you hear? What have you heard from customers that resonated with that? We chose to go down this path because we wanted to make sure we connected everything that's wonderful about Nutanix. And I'm going to brag about my marketing team. What I inherited here is an amazing marketing team. And we've all recognized that what this team has built in terms of the voice of the company in terms of the story that we created, a category I'll maybe not quite so humbly say we created with hyperconvergence. We want to connect the past to the present and into the future. And so, yes, give us your weekends back. That's something we have a common refrain we've heard from customers. Freedom to play is about building off of that, right? Freedom to build is about building on the early success we've had. Now with freedom to run, freedom to cloud, as we've moved into multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management, automation and control, these are new elements to our portfolio. So these are new storylines that we need to open up. So the way I like to think about it, this campaign is connecting everything that's been great about Nutanix to today and then also taking us into a new direction. So, Newridge talked earlier about the importance of being able to just go to the website, download Nutanix CE version, kick the tires. Promise Angelo Luciani who runs the community program. That wonderful program. Tie that together to the freedom program. How important is your community program? Which gave some big numbers today on stage. How important is that in helping customers discover Nutanix and move their careers and help digital transformation? Yeah, you know Keith, I'm glad you brought this up. Our next community, yeah, so the number I gave today was close to 70,000 active members and we've drawn almost 20,000 to all of our Docnex conferences over the past year. The online community to me is fundamental to how we continue to grow and deepen the connection and infinity we have with our customers. And what you're going to see us do is really bet on driving more curriculum. That's easy to consume. That helps our community members expand their knowledge base into areas like multi-cloud, hybrid cloud management. We introduced Nutanix era today, bringing new database services to the floor, starting with copy data management. That community needs to be step number one for where our best customers go and learn more about the roadmap. Learn about best tips and trades to be able to embrace these new capabilities and then weave that into the fabric of what they're doing with their data center builds. So community, I'm a big believer in it. We're lucky enough to have a vibrant, strong community already. So now it's like, how do we add more to that experience? This place is kind of like coming to Mecca. It's like coming to, for us, right? It's coming to the event to have a touchstone. But then for the other 51 weeks of the year, that's what Next Community is all about. Yeah, Ben, what type of roles are you trying to reach with your message? We've talked traditionally, you know, we're talking kind of the infrastructure, getting out of silos, going to the architect, but then you have a product like Beam, which doesn't even, you know, it started in the public clouds and working there. Who are you trying to reach with? Your freedom messaging and as you expand the portfolio to SaaS and beyond. It's interesting, our business is diversifying and the audience and the personas that we have to reach is definitely diversifying. So obviously we have great affinity with servers, storage admins, infrastructure managers. We are increasingly engaging up the IT stack, so to speak. Application owners and developers is a significant audience for us. In fact, yesterday for the first time at .next, we had our inaugural hackathon. And we had a lot of folks that come from DevOps practices within their organizations, and this is a huge growth area within enterprises. And they came yesterday, they sat down, they had six hours, we fed them cookies, we gave them drink, all sorts of drink, and they came up with some really cool new apps where they developed to our APIs. And that's just one representation of a new audience and building that bridge between who's building and architecting infrastructure and who's developing these new apps, which by the way, need to get to market immediately, which is why you need such radically simplified infrastructure to make that happen. App developers move up the stack. Before I came here to join you, I was with a room full of CIOs. And we talked a lot about some of the business pressures they're feeling. We talked a lot about governance and cloud. So there's a lot of new topics there that under the freedom campaign, we talk about freedom to cloud, but then the meat underneath that is really around some of these topics we covered earlier today. So we've been at other infrastructure shows that have tried to do DevOps and hackathons, and they haven't been successful or they've been successful for a limited amount. You guys actually quote unquote sold out the space. What is the message that's resonating with that crowd that's bringing them to a DevOps hackathon? And it was essentially still infrastructure focused audience. You know, the way I'll answer that question, one of my favorite early stories since I joined Nutanix, major retailer customer, the infrastructure team without telling the app dev folks move some of their early apps onto Nutanix. It didn't tell them. All of a sudden they start getting all these phone calls and it's like, what did you do? My apps are performing beautifully. Oh my gosh, it's so simple. Then they provided them with a portal that we offer to our software so they could see how everything is moving. Are the SLAs there? Are these apps humming? And they said, what did you do? Well, we moved it onto Nutanix. And so then all of a sudden this new audience for us starts saying, we want the Nutanix, which I think is a brilliant tagline. I love it. So we're trying to capture that spirit, right? So to me, it's about, in the past there's been a lot of frustration, Candlely, between these app developers who are under extreme pressure to get their new app to market. Customer facing, business facing or what have you. And it's been so slow to get it done. And so then often a crazy CMO of an organization may work around IT and go, throw something out into public cloud. Well, that could still be the model, but with the tools and HCI as a simplified infrastructure, now there's a big answer. Hey, we can move, we can sprint at your speed. And I think that's a key message. And so we're starting to attract that kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to help make that possible. All right, so Ben, you were talking about your team built a really impressive show here. Got the Hackathon is a new thing. One of the things I noticed here in the Expo hall, there's now a whole area with some of the channel providers. There's always been channel providers here, but they've got booths and speaking gigs. What other aspects for those people that didn't attend in person here, would you want to call out, give a little bit of color to what's happening? You know, Stu, thanks for pointing out channel partners. This year over 1,200 representatives from Nutanix's channel are here. And Lou Atenacio, my esteemed colleague and global head of sales and Rodney Foreman, our head of channels, they are both with me very focused on how do we go bigger and deeper with our channel community. If you think about it, they've moved to a software choice strategy. You can consume Nutanix on our own appliance. You can consume it on our OEM, great OEM partner Dell. But we also have ways that you consume our software with Cisco infrastructure, with HPE servers and the like. Channels is a wonderful way for us to be able to gauge and find that new elasticity candidly in the market, where they have customer relationships we may not have yet, but we have to invest in that. We have to invest in technical enablement. We have to invest in co-marketing with them. And I'd say we've done some on this front in the past. The time is now for us to really go deeper on that front. And now it's a big message we delivered during our partner exchange event just yesterday here in beautiful New Orleans. All right, so Ben, I guess do we have to wait to the closing keynote till we know where Nutanix.next.us is next year? Yes, you cannot get it out of me. The announcement will come tomorrow. Cameras are live, they're all asking. No, I'm not going to betray any body language or anything, but we're looking forward to seeing you there next year. All right, well, Ben Gibson, pleasure to catch up with you again for Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here from Nutanix.next in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE.