 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to London, England. I'm Stu Miniman, we're like co-host, you Piscar, and we're going to dig into one of the partnerships that Nutanix have. Joining me, two CUBE alums. Michael Cade, who's a technologist with Veeam, had you on the program last year, and welcome back a little closer to home for you here in London. Yeah, cheers, Stu, how are you? And welcome, six months with Nutanix, someone I've known CUBE alumni, so wherever you go, they're CUBE alumni always. So Jay Chittness, who's the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Nutanix. Jay, thanks for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me, it's great to be here, guys. All right, first of all, you know, Michael, what's it mean having the show here in London, and would love your opinion having kind of, how's Nutanix doing with Europe adoption? Yeah, so obviously being in London, it means I don't have to get on a plane and travel anywhere, right? So that's one benefit. But one thing I was there last year, obviously, we spoke. I think one of the things that I can see here is how many people are here. Like, it feels like it's doubled in numbers, doubled in size, double the conversations, obviously, with us, with our product coming out in July, August of this year. Only a version one, but we're seeing, like, good feedback, good strong feedback, and lots of questions around that. Yeah, absolutely, 3,500 is the number I heard here. Jay, we're going to talk about it with Veeam, so set the stage for us, data protection, what's going, you know, Nutanix positioning and what you look at. Yeah, it's a vibrant landscape, right? So, just going to pick up a little bit on the thread around the European side. We've got over 50 partners here, over 50 technology partners and a number of channel partners. There's just a vibrant buzz, and one of the first things that people always talk about is, hey, we're in the nation of GDPR, right? If you start to think about, just where's this notion of data, and where does it reside, data mobility, and that sort of thing, that's one of the first things that we get hit with all the time. We get asked a lot, and so, it's really core to what we do, right? And that's where the relationship really comes in. Yeah, well, I'd love to put a commentary there about GDPR, because that's right, I remember last year, like most of last year, every show that had data, data protection, everything like that, we talked about GDPR a lot. To be honest, once we got past May, we didn't talk about it a lot. I mean, we said, we know it's real when there were some lawsuits, and that happened rather fast to some of the really large companies, but is this still a major conversation with customers? Where are we? Yeah, yeah, massively. So, that sovereignty of data, where it resides, something that speaking to enterprise and mid-market customers over in Europe, they're absolutely still, top of mind is why are we keeping that data? Where are we keeping that data? How do we leverage our toolset to understand where that data is and then actually provide some insight into where it is and report against things like violations between different locations and just, we obviously have to go through that process of becoming GDPR compliant ourselves and obviously, as a global company, you have to kind of eat your own dog food and understand you have to know your own data, understand what that's doing, why are we keeping that, how it's being stored, and that message we just relayed back out into content and let our customers then use that. So, what does that look like? Maybe from a technology perspective, if you have to deal with GDPR from a Nutanix standpoint, from a VM standpoint, what does it change, right? What does it change in terms of backing up? What does it change in terms of storing it in the cloud or on-prem? Have you seen any major changes in how that works for customers? Yeah, so the good thing is, is that thinking about what that data is and where it's being stored, they know that in Germany, that data may not be able to leave Germany or that data may not be able to leave the UK or Ireland and they might have offices and remote locations in various different countries. So, a simple thing that we put in was the ability to put tagging on our repositories, on our physical constructs so that we knew the data half in the workflow and that was just, that's, and then be able to use then v1 to be able to report against that so you understood where that data was going but also it flag up any of those violations that maybe where a backup job has pushed it to a different location. We need to know about that and we need to fix it as fast as possible so that's one of the areas that we're talking. So, I can imagine that this is not only has had an impact from a technology perspective from a vendor's side but also in the service provider market. I guess, you know, a lot of service providers have gone into that space to be able to help customers with their GDPR issues. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, we were already aligned with our VCSP program so 20,000 VCSP partners out there and their model is as a service so being able to provide as a service and help them understand what that data is and know where that data is residing is key to those customers that can't necessarily put their workloads into the public cloud but they can put it into a trusted service provider or a VCSP. All right. Or a trusted enterprise private cloud or one of the things that we're seeing is when you start to think about data and where it resides, it's not just the cloud. It's not a discussion of is it on-prem? Is it in the cloud? There's this notion about this distributed cloud. Some of the stuff that we talked about earlier this morning around what does that mean when you start to think about where, first of all, the amount of data that's sitting in everything other than what we would consider an enterprise cloud. That's one. The second thing is how do you protect it? How do you back it up? What do you do at things at the edge, right? That requires a fundamentally different way of looking at things. Just the size and the volume of the data. Yeah, one of the key things that we're seeing is that sprawl of data. Not necessarily it doesn't really matter where that data resides whether it is on-premises or whether it's in the public cloud. It's the data and that sprawl of data that can sit on many different platforms. Yeah, all right. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit. Let's talk about AHV. So, in the earnings announcement earlier this week, the number I heard was 38% looking at the last four quarters trailing. So, strong growth. Actually, when I'd asked Deeridge about two years ago and said, okay, well, what's the goal? And he said, look, we're going to keep building and do it and customers will have choice. You know, if we get to 50%, that felt about right to him then. When I talked to him, he said, it seems right. It's not like we're going to eradicate everybody's other virtualization. That's not the goal. It's to do what makes sense. I remember one of the dot necks is when Veeam said, we are going to go down the path to adopt AHV. There are actually tiers in the audience. So, we know that ecosystem is super important at AHV. So, Jay, maybe set the table for us with that guideline as to where we are with the partner ecosystem. Obviously, Veeam's got some good, exciting stuff recently, but overall. Look, at the end of the day, the 38% number that you mentioned is critical, right? One of the things that we look at is, this is, our philosophy has always been about freedom. And so, some semblance of choice. And it doesn't matter whether you have a preference for a private cloud, a public cloud, a hypervisor. What we really are focused on is, how do we enhance incremental value at, especially in the management stack, right? It's not necessarily a, we absolutely want to become a hypervisor company. That's not the goal here, right? In order to, when you look at our partner landscape and our partner ecosystem, it kind of fits into a few things. First and foremost, it's about customers who want, when they buy Nutanix, it's because they're buying Nutanix to fit into a certain environment. Data protection, management, management orchestration, networking, and security. And then there's obviously customers who buy Nutanix for running something on top of us, right? An ISV, an enterprise ISV, big data applications, cloud native applications and things of that nature. One of the cornerstones for that ecosystem is to support AHV. And we're starting to see a significant amount of our partners, not only looking at supporting AHV, but actually going further and deeper. So we look at things in terms of the breadth of the ecosystem, which is great. We want to grow that. But we also look at the depth. And someone like Veeam who said, hey, look, we were partnering with you on the breadth where we were doing some stuff around supporting ESX. But really the game changer was AHV. AHV support, which was what, August? Yeah, yeah, beginning of August. I think the same premise as what you were just saying, Jay, is around, so bring that simplicity model. We don't really care what that is sitting on top. With the management layer, we're offering this hardware up as a service, or this layer of abstraction from a Veeam, obviously, from a Veeam perspective, it's all about the ease of use, the reliability, but also the flexibility. And that's something that we kind of have that synergistic approach to. I think that's a very shared common vision, right? It's making sure that you provide a seamless experience, one-click sort of experience, but being able to do so in a more cohesive manner. Sorry. Michael, I want you to bring us inside. I remember back when Veeam supported Microsoft Hyper-V. It was a big deal. There's a lot of engineering work that goes into it, and Move Veeam was more than just a virtualization company. Today, Veeam is multi-cloud. They've been playing lots of environment. Give us a little insight as to what happened and what special has been done for the interface and the technology to fully support AHV with Veeam. Yeah, I think, so 12 years ago, Veeam started out protecting those virtual workloads, virtualization first, VMware first, then Hyper-V, and then the physical agents came, and really that platform started to get broadened. What then happened is the AHV adoption rate from you guys was obviously rising, so we saw that and went in, but we took a different approach in terms of, okay, just because of what we've done in a VMware and Hyper-V world, doesn't necessarily mean that that will fit our Nutanix AHV customers. So we went out, we seeded the market, understood what that looked like, how it looked from both Nutanix point of view and also existing AHV customers, and then built the new AHV platform that we have to be able to protect them, but we still wanted to keep that agentless approach. But from a management perspective, we offer out a web interface that allows us to look very similar to the Prism interface, the management layer, so that an admin doesn't have to shift his command stage, his knowledge of working and management into that mindset. So version one, and again, there's a considerable amount of effort gone into that as a pretty full-on feature list of features in that version one, and that's going to continue to roll out over 2019 and beyond. So looking at this from a customer perspective, back when I built an IS platform based on Nutanix, based on VM, one of the things that was high on my list was AHV support. Simply because AHV, the hypervisor, it became a commodity, even as a service provider, even as an IS provider, I didn't really care what hypervisor I ran. And so support from VM to actually be able to back up VMs on AHV, and that was top priority for me. And seeing you guys use that different UI, even though it was a little bit of a shock because we've been using VM for maybe a decade already, we're used to it. A little bit of a culture shock to start using it. When you do, it becomes a totally different experience because it is aligned with Nutanix. So maybe tell us about why you've taken that approach of using the way of integrating with the Nutanix UI instead of staying at your old UI. Yeah, and so exactly, it was mostly around Nutanix admins and their feedback around if we can just have another tab that looks and feels exactly how our management plane looks like, then that would be more of a benefit. Now, obviously within being back on replication, there's still visibility of those jobs. Now, there's no configuration. Later that's one of the biggest asks that we're getting in the forums, in the public forums, is when can we have exactly what you're asking for there? Is it around how can we bring that central manager back into BBR? Because they may have Nutanix clusters running different hypervisors, and that's all supported from us. But then now we've got to go outside of that single management interface into the prism-like management for that. So I kind of see that from that perspective. But so that was really the main key for version one is get something out that's the same as what our Nutanix administrators are used to. So, you know, if we're talking about futures, so what's next for via managed analytics? A real short question, short answer maybe. Yeah, without being fired. But so version two, so update one. So 1.1, that will be out in the next few, let's say weeks, months. And that really doesn't bring any major features or changes. That's the generic bug fixes. There's a few things that needed to be ironed out in the interface, but also as the process. So that will be relatively soon. Then the good thing around the ability to develop against what we're doing with AHV is that because it's so separate from the VBR piece, it allows us to hopefully keep that much more frequent cadence of release. So we'll be starting to see more news about version two as we get into early 2019. Yeah, just last thing, wondering what you could say about adoption so far. How much pent up demand was there? And I'd like to hear first from the Veeam standpoint, how many customers, if you can share anything about that? And then Jay, what this means for AHV adoption? So I don't have specific numbers, up to date numbers, but I have seen the Salesforce numbers grow from an opportunity perspective. And that's specifically where Veeam availability for Nutanix AHV is included in that Salesforce opportunity. So one of the things though is that we're seeing, if you're familiar with the Veeam forums, that in particular forum thread is growing and growing because people are understanding that we can help shape what we do here. Like we want those customers that are using it on a daily basis to give us that feedback. Do you expect there to be new Veeam customers due to this offering? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think we absolutely expect new Veeam customers, right? I think at the end of the day, you go back to your question around AHV. Having a healthy ecosystem is really what's going to drive AHV adoption, right? So partners like Veeam who've done that is really what is providing some choice back. To your question around what do we expect in the next few months, quarters? What we're seeing is a lot of demand on, what's the right way? We're seeing a lot more demand on additional functionality that people, customers would like to add into there, right? So AHV is just the beginning of the platform. It's not the end state. And then you start, we're starting to see is a lot of customers, partners who are taking on things like, oh, well that's interesting. Now I can do something with files or buckets or add on top of it where now all of a sudden I can derive even more value. So AHV is just step one if you will, right? Yeah, I think that's important as well. So we've got update four coming out early next year. That's going to bring the ability to leverage the Nutanix buckets that we've heard about this week. There's also other cloud mobility but to the option of being able to convert those machines and send them up into Azure or AWS to be able to run test and development up there but that whole cloud mobility about movement of data and making it seamless using the same tool set. One of the key differentiators is the VBK format. So those who know Veeam, they use a VBK format and that's exactly the same format that the Nutanix AHV product views as well. Absolutely, well congratulations. Really looked at, as I said, this is really opening the door to start the journey as to where your customers are going. I've been hearing feedback from customers that have been waiting for this for a while and excited to see how this matures as things go forward. So Jay, Michael, thanks so much for joining us and stay with us. Full day of coverage here at Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in London. Thanks for watching theCUBE.