 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer, we are live from DockerCon 2018 on a stunning day here in San Francisco at Moscone Center. Excited to welcome to theCUBE Chris Brown, the technical marketing manager at Nutanix. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much for having me. So you've been with Nutanix for a couple of years. So we'll talk about Nutanix and containers. You have a session, control and automate your container journey with Nutanix. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about in this session, what's Nutanix's role in helping customers get over this trepidation of containers? Definitely, and it's a 20 minute session so we've got a lot of information to cover there because I want to go over a little bit about who Nutanix is from the beginning to the end but the main part I'm going to be focusing on in that session is talking about how we, with our com product, can automate VMs and containers together and how we're moving towards being able to define your application in a blueprint and understand what you're trying to do with your application. One of the things I always say is that nobody runs SQL because they love running SQL. They run SQL to do something and our goal with the com is to capture that something, what it depends on, what it relies on. Once we understand what this particular component is supposed to do in your application, we can change that and we can move that to another cloud or we can move it to containers without losing that definition and without losing its dependence on the other pieces of your infrastructure and exchange information back and forth. So we're talking a little bit about what we're doing today with com and where we're going with it to add in that Kubernetes support. Chris, we're sitting here in the ecosystem expo at DockerCon and your booth is busy and there's a lot of good activity. Are people coming up to you and asking do they know Nutanix? Do they understand who you are? Do they just say, oh, you guys sell boxes? You know, you're both a, you're a systems provider, you're a private cloud provider and a hybrid cloud provider. Do people understand that, the crowd here or what kind of conversations are you having? It's actually really interesting because we're seeing a broad range of people. Some customers are coming up, or some people are coming up that they don't realize, they don't know that other places in the company use Nutanix but they want to learn more about us or they've got some sort of initiative that, you know, a lot of times it is around containers, around understanding, you know, they're starting to figure out, you know, how do we deploy this, how do we connect, you know, we've got something we want to deploy here and there, how do we do that in a scalable way? But we also have some that have no idea who we are and just coming up like, so you've got a booth and some awesome giveaways, you know, what do I have to do to get that and what do you do? And, you know, I really, I kind of summarize it as two main groups of people that I've seen is, one of them is the people who've been doing containers for forever and they know it, they've been doing it, they're very familiar with the command line, the RET, you know, that any GUI is too much GUI for them. And then we've got the people who are just getting started, they've kind of been told, hey, containers are coming, we need to figure out how to do this or we've got, you know, we need to start figuring out our container strategy and so they're here to learn and figure out how to begin that. And so it's really interesting because, you know, those, the ones that are just getting started or just learning, we obviously help out a ton because the people who came before had to go through all of the fire, all of the configuration, all of the challenges and figure out their own solutions whereas now we can kind of come in as a little bit more opinionated example of how to do these things. So DockerCon, this year, this is the fifth DockerCon. They've got between 5,000 and 6,000 people. I was talking with John earlier and Steve Singh as well that I was really impressed when I was leaving the general session, it was standing from only a sea of heads. So they've got, obviously developers here, right? Sweet spot, IT folks, enterprise architects and execs. You talked about Nutanis getting those, the two polar opposite ends of the spectrum, the container lovers, the ones who are the experts and the ones going, I know I have to do this. I'm curious, what target audience are you talking to that goes, hey, I'm tasked with doing this, are those developers, are those IT folks, are you talking with execs as well? Give us that mix. For the most part, they are IT folks, two digital operators who are trying to figure out this new shift in technology. And we have talked to some developers and it's actually been interesting to have, speak with developers, because in general that's not, it hasn't been Nutanix's traditional audience. We've sold this private cloud infrastructure to develop, but developers have been, few developers I have talked to have gotten really receptive and really excited about what we can do and how we can help them do their job faster by getting their IT people on board. But for the most part, it would be traditional IT operators who are looking at this new technology and giving it kind of a little squinty eye and trying to figure out where it's going. Because at the end of the day, with any shift in IT, there is never a time when something is completely sunset. I mean, people are still using mainframes today, people will be using mainframes forever. People are just starting their virtualization journey today. They're just going from bare metal to VMs. And then even with that shift, there's always something that gets left behind. So they're trying to figure out how can we get used to this new, this container shift, because at the end of the day, not everything is going to be containerized, because there's just simply some things that won't be able to or they'll scope out the project and then it'll end up falling by the wayside or budget will go somewhere else. So they're trying to figure out how they can understand the container world from the world that they come from, the VM-centric world. And then it's really interesting to talk to them and show them how we're able to bring those two together and really not only bring the container journey up another step, but also carry your VMs along the way as well. Chris, Nutanix is at the center of several different transitions, right? Both old school hardware to kind of hyper-converge, but now also kind of private hybrid cloud to more kind of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. When we're not at DockerCon, so when you're out in the field, how real is multi-cloud, how real is containers in a normal enterprise? Definitely. So multi-cloud is very hot topic for sure. There is no IT department that doesn't have some sort of cloud strategy or analyzing it or looking at it. The main way that we get there, one of the core tools we have is COM once again. I'm obviously biased because that's my wheelhouse when in marketing, so I talk about that day in, day out. But with COM, we support today AHV and ESXi both on and off Nutanix, as well as AWS, AWS GovCloud and GCP. And Azure's coming in down the line, that's where Kubernetes will come in as well. So we see a lot of people looking at this and saying, hey, we do want to be able to move into AWS, we do want to be able to move into GCP and use those clouds or unify them together. And so COM lets us do that. There's a couple other prongs to that as well. One of them is Beam, Nutanix Beam, which was a product we announced at .next last month, which is around multi-cloud cost optimization. Beam came from an acquisition that a bot metric, the company was called Milngar, I'm probably saying that horribly wrong, but made a product called Bot Metric, which we've rebranded and are integrating into the platform as Nutanix Beam. So what that allows you to do is, you can, it's provided as a SaaS service. So you can go use it today, there's a trial available, all that. You give it AWS credentials and it reaches out takes a look at your billing account and says, hey, we noticed that these VMs are running 50% of the time at no capacity, or they're not being used at all. You can probably cut that down, shrink these and save it. Or, hey, we noticed that in general, you're using this level, this baseline level, you should buy these in reserved instances to save this much per month. And it presents all that up in a really easy to use interface. And then, depending on how you want to use it, you can even have it automatically go and resize your VMs for you. So I can say, hey, you've got a T2 medium or an M2 medium running. It really would make a lot more sense as an M2 small. You can, it'll give you the API call, you can go make it on your own, or you can have, if you give the authorization, of course, it can go ahead and run that for you and just downsize those and start saving you that money. So that's another fork of that, the multi-cloud strategy. And the last one is one of the other announcements we made around last month, which was around, excuse me, extract for VMs. So extract is a portfolio of products we've got extract for DBs where we can scan your SQL databases and move them into ESXi or AHV, both from bare metal or wherever the SQL database is running. Extract for VMs allows us to scan ESXi VMs and move them over to AHV. And then we're taking extract for VMs the next step and being able to scan your AWS VMs and pull them back on-prem, if that's what you're looking for as well. So that's right now in beta and they're working on fine-tuning that. And because at the end of the day, it's not enough just to view and manage. We really need to get to some place where we can move workloads between and put the workload in the right place because really with IT, it's always a balance of tools. There's never one golden bullet that solves every problem. Every time a new project comes out, you're trying to choose the right tool based on the expertise of the team, based on what tools are already in use and based on policy. So we want to be able to make sure that we have the tool sets across that you can choose and change those choices later on and always use the right thing for the particular application you're running. Choice was a big theme this morning during the general session where Docker was talking about choice agility and security. I'm curious with some of the things that were announced, they're talking about the only multi-cloud, multi-OS, multi-Linux. They also were talking about, they announced this federated containerized application management saying, hey, containers have always been portable, but management hasn't been. I'm curious what your perspectives are on some of the evolution that Docker is announcing today and how will that help Nutanix customers be able to successfully navigate this container journey? Definitely. Federation's critical, being able to, container management in general is always a challenge. One of the things that I've heard time and time again is that getting RBAC to work through Kubernetes has always been very difficult. And so getting that in there, getting that is such a basic feature that people expect. So getting the ability to properly federate, roll to federate out authentication is huge. There's a reason that SAML took the world by storm is that nobody wants to manage passwords. You want to rely on some external source of truth. Being able to pull that in, being able to use some cloud service and have it federated against, having Docker federated against other pieces is very important there. I might have gone way off there, but whatever. Yeah, I don't know, absolutely. And then the other piece of it is that we, with the idea of it doesn't matter if you're running on-prem or in the cloud, that is what people need. That's one of the true promises of containers has always been is the portability. So seeing the delivery of that is huge. And being able to provision it on-prem, on Nutanix obviously, because that's where I'm here from. But, and being able to provision to the cloud and bring those together, that's huge. Chris, you talked about Kubernetes a couple of times now. Obviously a big topic here. Seems to be kind of emerging de facto, application deployment configuration for multi-cloud. What's Nutanix doing with Kubernetes? Yeah, so definitely Kubernetes is really, and in many ways, winning that particular battle. I mean, you don't go wrong, Swarm is great and the other pieces are great, but Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard. One of the things we're working on is bringing containers of the service through Kubernetes natively on Nutanix to give you an easy way to manage, to through Prism manage containers just the way you manage VMs, manage Kubernetes clusters. And you know, it's really important that that is just one solution because there's as many different Kubernetes orchestration engines as you can name, any name you bring in. So that's why. It's like Linux, back in the day. There are a lot of different distributions or there's a lot of different ways to consume Kubernetes. Exactly. And so, we want to be able to bring a opinionated way of consuming Kubernetes to the platform natively, just as a, so it's a couple of clicks away, it's very easy to do. But that's not the only way that we're doing it. We're also, we do have a partnership with Docker where we're doing things like deploying Docker EE through Com or Docker, you know, it's of course all sorts of legalese, but they're working on that so it's natively in everyone's Prism central. You can just one click deploy Docker EE. You know, we have a demo running our booth deploying Rancher using Com as well because we want to be able to provide whatever set of infrastructure makes the most sense. For the customer based on, you know, this is what they've used in the past is what they're familiar with or this is what they want. We also want to offer an opinionated way to deliver a containers as a service so that those of you that don't know are just trying to get started or that that's what they're looking for. This, you know, when you've got a thousand choices to make everyone's going to make slightly different ones. So we can't ever offer one that no one can offer the true, this is the only way to do Kubernetes. We need to offer flexibility across as well. One of the words we hear all the time at trade shows is flexibility. So I love customer stories as a customer marketing person. I think there's no greater brand validation you can get than the voice of the customer. And I was looking on the Docker website recently and they were saying, customers that migrate to Docker Enterprise Edition are actually reducing costs by 50%. So you're a marketing guy. What are some of your favorite examples of customers where Nutanix is really helping them to just kill it on their container journey? Yeah. So there's a kind of, which I thought of this sooner. I should have, no. But we have a, one of our customers actually, this always brings a smile on my face because they came and saw us last year at the booth. They're one of our existing long time customers and they're looking to adopt Docker. They came up and we gave them a demo, show them how, you know, all the pieces we're doing, all the, and he was looking at it, he's like, man, I need this in my life right now. It was mostly a demo around Docker, you know, using the unified control plane, showing off using Nutanix drivers, showing how we can back up the data and protect individual components of the containers in a very, very granular fashion. He's like, man, I need this in my life. This is incredible. And he went and grabbed his friend and ran him over and was like, dude, we're already using Nutanix. Look what they can do. And he's a perfect example of the two kinds of customers. So I guess I'll like hold on a second, jumps on the command line like, oh yeah, I do this all the time from the car. But you know, that was the, that light up, the light in the eyes of the customer there where they're like, this, I need to be able to see this to be able to use this and be able to integrate this. That's, I will not forget that anytime soon. That's really why I think we're going down a very good path there. Because the ability to, when you have these tinkers, the people who are really good at code, I mean, I spend a lot of time on the command line myself even though I'm in marketing. So I don't know what I'm doing there, PowerPoints maybe, but you know, just because I can understand it from the command line or an expert can understand it, doesn't mean that you can share that. You know, I've been, I'm trying to hand off some of the gear that I manage off to another person. And I was like, oh, you just type on all these commands and they're like, I have no idea what's going on here. And so seeing the customers be able to understand what their more, you know, more in-depth coworkers have done in a GUI fashion, that's just really, you know, that makes a lot of sense to me and I like that a lot. Are you seeing any last question as we wrap up? You know, some of the, one of the stats actually that was mentioned in the Docker press release this morning about the new announcements was 85% of enterprise organizations have multi-cloud and then we were talking with Scott Johnston, their chief product officer that said, you know, upwards of 90% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on for existing applications. So there's a lot of need there for enterprises to go this route. I'm wondering, are you seeing at Nutanix any particular industries that are really leading edge here saying, hey, we have a lot of money that we're not able to use for innovation? Are you seeing that in any specific industries or is it kind of horizontal? I, to be honest, I've seen it kind of horizontally. I mean, I've had customers, I've spoken to many different customers, mostly around COM because, but you know, and they come from all different walks of life. You know, I've seen, I've talked to customers from, you know, Sled, who've been really excited about, you know, their ability to start, you know, better doing Hadoop because they do thousands of Hadoop clusters a year for their researchers. I've talked to, you know, in the cloud or on-prem or across. I've talked to, you know, people in governments. I've talked to people in hospitals and, you know, all sorts of... I can mention oil and gas. Some of those industries that have a ton of data. Yeah, and it's actually, the oil and gas is really fascinating because a lot of times they, they, like in a rig, they want to be able to use compute but they can't really exactly get to a cloud. So how do you innovate there and on the edge without, you know, how do you make a change in the core without making that on the edge and how do you bring those together? And so there's a lot of really fascinating things happening around that. But I haven't noticed any one industry in particular. It's across, is that everyone is... Then again, by the time they get to me it's probably self-selected, you know? But it's, you know, it's across horizontally is that everyone is looking at how can we use this best or I just found out this is already being used in my environment because it's super easy. How do I keep a job? Or how do I, you know, how do I adopt this and how do I, you know, free up my investments in keeping the lights on into innovation? How do I save time? How do I, because one of the things that I've noticed with, you know, all of this cloud adoption or container and all that is that many times a customer will start making this push either, not always from low level, maybe from high level, but they start making this push because they hear it's faster and better and that it'll just solve all their problems if they just start using this. And because they rush into it, they don't often, you know, they don't solve the fundamental problems that gave them the issue to begin with. And so they're just hoping that this new technology fixes it. So now there's, we are seeing some, I am seeing some customers shift back and say, hey, I do want to adopt that, but I need to do it in a smart way because we just ran to it and that caused us problems. Well, it sounds like with all the momentum, John, that we've heard in the keynote, the general session this morning and with some of the guests, you know, I think even Steve Singh was saying only about half of the audience is actually using containers. So it sounds like with what you're talking about with what we've heard consistently today, we're sort of the tip of the iceberg. So lots of opportunity. Chris, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us all the exciting things that are going on in Nutanix with containers and more. Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE, Lisa Martin with John Troyer from Duckercon 2018. Stick around, we will be right back with our next guest.