 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by Keith Townsend and we're here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program, Binny Gill who's the CTO of Cloud Services at Nutanix and welcome a first time guest, long time caller, you know, long time watcher, first time caller, Vijay Raiapati, who's the general manager of Nutanix Beam, a brand new service and acts, came from the Minjar acquisition. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. Great. Yeah, Vijay, so for those that don't know, bring us back a little bit, you know, Minjar tells a little bit about the company, how many people and then we'll get into the integration and the launch. Yeah, so we started Minjar in 2012, late 2012, primarily focused on, you know, building a public cloud optimization service. So our flagship product is Botmetric, which is one of the highest rated and reviewed solution in AWS marketplace. We are primarily based in Bangalore and focused on, you know, helping customers as they're moving to this public cloud journey. How can you help them deliver governance across their consumption from a cost perspective and compliance, you know, from a security perspective. That's what we were focused on and we joined Nutanix last quarter. You know, I'm really excited to be here and look forward to continue, you know, building on it. All right, Vinny, maybe you can help us connect the dots. So look at XI, look at the services that Nutanix is building. Usually it starts with your infrastructure. Yep. That's not where Minjar, you know, came from. So help us connect the dots as to how, what led to the acquisition, how it expands the portfolio and what's your first-ask product? I mean, if you look at what we are talking about as our true north, what we are doing is we're building a hybrid cloud. You know, we started with building a private cloud and customers asking us, hey, solve the public cloud problem for us, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and most of the enterprises today are dispersed, right? So when we talk about enterprise cloud, what we mean is this dispersed cloud including IoT devices. And you'll see some of that in the demo this evening. So the first question that comes to mind is, okay, how am I going to manage all my dispersed cloud entities and not all of them are owned by Nutanix? So when we looked at Minjar and the capabilities, it was right on target. They are helping customers consume the cloud and solve the two problems that they have that they lose sleep on. One is, do I have control on cost? And the other is, do I have control on security compliance? So that's a good capability to have and with Vijay's team's help, we are going to expand it to all the clouds including Nutanix and beyond and provide it to all our customers. So today, where is the service? How do I consume it? Help me understand that. So this is the first SaaS service that Nutanix has launched. And it can be consumed from beam.nutanix.com and we intend to continue on the service in future as a SaaS offering for customers, both Nutanix customer and not Nutanix customers. What we have today is we support Amazon Cloud and Azure and we are working on bringing integration for Nutanix and then we'll bring support for other cloud providers as well. I'm sorry, just how many customers did you have running on the bot metric service in the past? We have a couple of hundred customers using bot metric. We track close to about a billion dollar plus in public cloud consumption through bot metric before it became Nutanix and yeah. So Vijay, help us understand the larger industry in this larger space. It's been relatively a crowded space for some time. There's been a lot of solutions that helped with cloud security, performance monitoring, et cetera. What was the unique gap or value opportunity you saw bot metric? Yeah, I mean there are two unique things that we found when we work with this public cloud customers. The challenge is there were a lot of tools which were providing visibility, right? But there weren't many tools providing ability to remediate those things that you detect, right? Essentially from day one when we built bot metric platform, we built it like an action-oriented platform so you not only get visibility, you can essentially automate those issues either for an optimization or for control through our automation engine. So there is a lot of invisible automation in Nutanix Beam versus just being this beautiful UI which can give you a lot of insights and reports. And that's a big differentiator. That's one of the reason why a lot of customers when they write reviews about the product, they say, man I really love it because it not only tells me what I need to do, I don't need to go and do those hundred things as an engineer and I can rather click to fix or deploy an automation that can go and do these things. And one of the other things that was very interesting in what Beam does is it also can predict what the cost is going to be at the end of the month. Instead of being surprised by the end of the month and you will, you know how it is today and how the system is predicting it. So that gives you more control on making sure that if there's an over expenditure that's going to happen, you can take actions today. So what type of automation and adjustments can Beam make on my behalf? Yeah, I think pretty much anything that a cloud ops or a DevOps engineer do, what we don't do is we don't do any provisioning or orchestration, right? Even as a bot metric, we never did that. What we were focused on is how can we solve operational issues on a day-to-day basis, whether they're related to cost or they're related to compliance or they're related to automation. So it can detect things. You can do custom scaling from Beam. You can do, you know, resizing of things. You can clean up unused resources. You can go and run custom audits using Python on Beam. So there are like a lot of things that a day two or a day three on a continuous basis as a cloud ops or a DevOps engineer that you need to do. That's what we deliver as a invisible automation or we call it event-driven automation, right? When certain events happen, you know, how can we automate those things or right once use, you know, multiple times? Vinny, can you walk us through what kind of Nutanix stamp has been put on the product leading to the Beam, maybe give us a little bit of your philosophy as to, you know, how the software acquisitions, what they have to go through before they become really Nutanix products. First of all, any acquisition, we want to make sure that the team is a great team, that people are the most important. From a technology perspective, they need to be solving the pain points of the customers. Now, when we integrate any service into our cloud platform, we focus on three things. One is identity. So when a customer logs in to our ZyCloud services or logs in on-prem, they should be able to use a single sign on across all the services. Second thing is billing. We want to make sure that how we bill the customers, not like separate bills that come and they have to put them together, has to be single billing. Also in terms of how you spend, we're working on programs where you can buy some Nutanix currency coins and then you can use it either in the private cloud or in the public cloud, but the decision could be a late-binding decision. And finally, it's about making sure that the one-click simplicity that we keep talking about and delivering is there. And we've been lucky that with the Beam product, a lot of it is already there. That's why it's already G8, but we make sure that it goes through the same rigor of making sure that the user experience is awesome. So let's talk about that time to integration, I'll call it. The ability for you guys to take Beam, which is, or biometric at the time, a completely separate product from Com, XI, and then you take that, turn it into Beam, a SaaS product, which is your first SaaS product, how do you keep that consistent view across the entire Nutanix portfolio experience so that administrators are not leaving one to the goal until another one, which a SaaS offering is very different than what you guys have offered in the past. Correct. So we're working on that, both on-premises view and in the cloud view. So as you might have noticed when we came up with XI, we said it's XI Cloud Services and DR is the first service, because when you log into XI, you're logging into all of the cloud services. And then the menu of services will show up and Beam is one, DR is one, and more will come in. So we've already thought through that. On-premises, if you've noticed in our history, we had Prism Central, and then we announced Com support and it's baked into Prism. It's not a separate tool. We took one and a half years to make sure that it does not look like a schizophrenic set of products when we announced Flow. If you look at other vendors like VMware, they have separate NSX manager, NSX controllers. In our case, it's the same Prism Central. Once you upgrade, you get that feature. So that's in our discipline and anything we do, we take the time and make sure it's going to be a single experience for the customer. We're doing the same thing. So Vigis team is quite rapid in agile and doing stuff. They've integrated with our single identity system, integrating with a single billing system. So that has happened rapidly with this case. I think we focus a lot, at least at Nutanix, when I joined, there's a lot of emphasis on experience. How do we make sure we deliver a consistent experience for the user from an identity perspective, from a service usage perspective, as well as from a support perspective? I know it's a common support, it's a common identity, and it's a common billing. And you rightly touched upon, as we are innovating on a lot of the services, there is a lot of thinking going on, saying how do we bring a common experience, unified experience that is seamless, rather than having different endpoints, people who need to go and try to remember these things. I think we'll continue to work and innovate on that front. But experience is one thing that Nutanix is really good at. If you go on to digital media and look at it, a lot of people are saying, oh man, we really like what we saw from a user experience perspective of the product. And we already took a lot of those design concepts you know, Nutanix has in terms of the UI and UX. The beam that you said today is completely consistent with our 3.0 design philosophy internally for all products. So the customer has same kind of experience. Of course, it's a SaaS service. As Vinny said, we are trying to bring a lot of this SaaS services under ZyCloud services so the user can consume it. Just like they consume a GCP or an Azure or AWS, right? At the end of the day, you have EC2, RDS, you know? There is a common frame that brings all these things together. And one additional thing that we're doing which has not been done before is providing these services in a hybrid mode. So some of these services like Calm and our infrastructure as a service capability, we've announced error, how do we provide it in a hybrid cloud view world where you can run the service on-prem, you can migrate the app that depends on the service. So the service should also be available in the cloud. And those are some of the hard problems that we are working on, but we believe that we have the tools and the experience to make that happen. So, Vijay, just one dotto's announced. You got some cool new t-shirts you're going to show us. What should we be looking for from the roadmap there? And yeah, show that t-shirt off. So there are three, I mean, like there are two primary things that we are very focused on, right? You know, one is how can we bring a lot more intelligence, not just, you know, from insights and actions? How can we help customers, you know, make those choices of, you know, moving the workload? Because if you see there are a lot of components that Nutanix is building, even today we announced Cloud Extract, which is kind of a one-click mobility, not just from cloud to Nutanix, it is going to support from Nutanix to, you know, other, you know, clouds as well. Because there is a strong cultural belief within the company that, you know, we need to have, give customers the freedom of choice and deliver a good service at the right price, you know, so that, you know, they feel confident, right, of, you know, about what we are doing and what we deliver to them. So in that context, one is obviously, you know, bringing multiple clouds, you know, currently we support Amazon and Azure, but we will bring, you know, GCP support and we will launch, you know, Nutanix, we will launch, you know, other providers as well, right? We won't stop just with them. And the next thing is, you know, how do we make, you know, this experience a lot more seamless and we will also integrate with Calm and, you know, a couple of, you know, other products that we have, you know, as we, you know, outline. So that customers can get visibility, of course, by workloads, by apps. They don't need to come, you know, to beam, you know, to consume them. So, Vinny, one last question. Keith, this is critically important as you bring on your first SAS offering, billing and procurement. What is the average experience for the Nutanix customer who hadn't, you know, the infrastructure team didn't whip out a credit card by a NX system. What is the experience for setting up billing with your SAS services? Right, so a lot of it has not GAD yet, but, you know, if you look at some of the demos that we have done for XI Cloud Services, including DR, it's, you know, the customer can provide a credit card and, you know, consume it as they're used to with the public cloud. We're also, we also have programs where they can buy some credits, you know, Nutanix coins up front and use them, both on-prem and in the cloud. So these things are in the works and we are listening to our customers, not one size does not fit all and we know that in the enterprise, but we'll have multiple options for them. Excellent. Sounds just like, I've listened to my children saying, I get the coins to do Fortnite and things like that. The millennials will be good. They buy some credits, buy it here, buy it there, use it up. Vinny and Vijay, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the launch of the product. We look forward to keeping an eye on it as that grows in the portfolio grows. Thank you. Thank you for having me. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more program here at Nutanix.NEXT 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE.