 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the global.next digital experience brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, and welcome back. We're wrapping up our coverage of the Nutanix.next global digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm happy to welcome to the program, help us as I said, wrap things up. We're going to be talking about running better, running faster and running anywhere, a theme that we've heard in the keynotes and throughout the two-day event of the show. We have three VPs to help go through all the pieces. Coming up on the screen, first of all, we have Greg Smith, who's the vice president of product and technical marketing. Right next to him is Madhukar Kumar, who's the vice president of product and solutions marketing. And on the far end, the senior vice president, Thomas. Cornely, he is the senior vice president, as I said, for product portfolio management. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Good to be here Stu. Thank you for having us. Good to be here Stu. All right, so.next to show, we really enjoy, of course, this is the global event, so not just the US and the European and Asia, but we really get to see across the globe and a lot going on. I've had the pleasure of watching Nutanix since the early days, been to most of the events. And the portfolio is quite a bit bigger than just the original HCI solution. Thomas, since portfolio management is under your purview, before we get into summarizing all of the new pieces and the expansion into cloud and software and everything, just give us if you could, that overview of the portfolio as it's coming into the show. Yeah, no, absolutely Stu. I mean, as you said, this is, we've been doing this now for 10 plus years, and we've grown the portfolio. We've had a lot of products over the years. And so what we rolled out at this conference is a new way to talk about what we do at Nutanix and what we deliver in terms of set of offerings. And we talk about the 4D. We start with our digital hyper-converged infrastructure, which is the core HCI stack that you can run on any server. And that stack, this supports our data center services, which combines our storage solutions, our business continuity and disaster recovery solutions and security solutions. Our DevOps services, which is our database automation services, our application delivery automation services, and now our new carbon and Kubernetes platform and service offerings. And then our desktop services, which is our core VDI offering and our frame desktop and the service offering. So put all this together. This is what we talked about the 4Ds, which is our Nutanix cloud platform that you can run on-premises and now on any cloud. Well, thank you, Thomas, for laying the groundwork for us. Greg, we're going to come to you first, that one better theme. As Thomas said, and as we know, HCI is at the core. A lot of discussions this year, of course, the ripple effect of the global pandemic has more people working remotely. That's been a tailwind for many of the core offerings. But help us understand, how's that building out some of the new things that we should look at in the HCI space? Yeah, thanks, Stu. I mean, for Nutanix and our customers, well, it begins with HCI, right? And what we've seen in the past year is really aggressive adoption for HCI, particularly in core data center and private cloud operations. And customers are moving to HCI, not only for greater simplicity, but to get faster provisioning and scaling. And I think from a workload perspective, we see two things, that HCI is being called upon to deliver even more demanding apps. You know, those were like really very low latency, such as large scale database deployments. And we also see that HCI is expected to improve the economics of IT in the data center, and specifically by increasing workload density. So we have a long history, a story history of continually improving HCI performance. In fact, every significant software release, we've optimized the core data path. And we've done it again. We've done it again with our latest HCI software release that we announced just this week at Dot Next. The first enhancement we made was in 5.18 was to reduce the CPU overhead and latency for accessing storage devices, such as SSD and NVME. And we've done this by managing storage space on physical devices in the HCI software. So rather than rely on slow or internal file systems. And this new technology is called BlockStore. And our customers can take advantage of BlockStore simply by upgrading to the new software release. And we're seeing immediate performance gains of 20 to 25% for IOPS and latency. And then we built on top of that, we've added software support for Intel Octane by leveraging user space libraries, specifically SBTK or Storage Performance Development Kit. And SBTK allows new tanks to access devices from user space and avoid expensive interrupts and systems calls. So with this support along with BlockStore, we're seeing application performance gains about this 56% or more. So we're just building on a legacy of pushing performance and software. And that's the real benefit of moving to HCI. And just to add to that, so when it comes to run better, I think one of the things that we think of running better is automation and operation. And when it comes to automation and operation, there are a couple of very, I would say significant announcements that we also did too. One is around Calm as a Service. Calm is one of those products that our customers absolutely love. And now with Calm as a Service, you have a SAS plane, so you could just without installing anything or configuring anything, you could just take advantage of it. And the other thing we also announced is something called Nutanix Central. And Nutanix Central gives you the way to manage all your applications on Nutanix across all of your different clusters and infrastructure from a single place as well. So two big parts of run better as well. Well, that's great. And that really is that foundational layer. Monarchar, we talk about expanding out, running faster. The other piece we've talked about for a few years is step one is you modernize the platform. And then step two is really you have to modernize your application. So maybe help us understand that changing workload, cloud native is that discussion that we've been having for a few years now. What are you hearing from your customers and what new pieces do you have to expand and enable that piece of the overall stack? Yeah, so I think what you mentioned which is around cloud native, the big piece over there is around Kubernetes. And we already had carbon. So with carbon, a lot of the things of complexities around managing Kubernetes is already taking care of. But there are higher level aspects on it like you have to have observability, you have to have log, you have to have manage the ingress outgress which has a lot of complexity involved. So if you're really just looking for building out applications, what we found is that a lot of our customers are looking for a way to be able to manage that on their own. So what we announced, which is carbon platform service enables you to do exactly that. So if you're really just really concerned about creating cloud native applications without really worrying too much about how do I configure the Kubernetes clusters? How do I manage STO? How do I manage all of that? Carbon platform service is actually encapsulates all of that through a SAS play so you can go in and create your cloud native application as quickly and as fast as possible. But just in the typical Nutanix style, we wanted to give that freedom of choice to our customers as well. So if you do end up utilizing this, what you can also choose is the endpoint where you want these applications to run. And you could choose any of the public clouds or the hyperscalers or you could use Nutanix or an IoT as an endpoint as well. So that was one of the big announcements we made. Great, Greg, before we go on, it's one of the things that I think is a thread throughout, but maybe doesn't get highlighted as much, but security, of course, has been front and center for a while, but here in 2020 is even more emphasized. Things like Bransonware, of course, even more so today than it has been for a couple of years. So maybe you could have just addressed where we are with security and any new pieces along there that we should understand. Yeah, I can start with that if I could. So we've long had security in our platform, specifically micro-segmentation, firewalling individual workloads to provide least privilege access. And what we've announced this week at .next is we've extended that capability. Specifically, we've leveraged some of the capability in XiBeam, and this is our SaaS-based service, to really build a single dashboard for security operators. So with Security Central, again, a cloud-based SaaS app, NuTex customers can get a single pane from which they can monitor the entire security posture of their infrastructure and applications. It gives you asset reporting, asset inventory reporting. You can get automated compliance checks for HIPAA, for PCI, and others. So we've made security really easy in keeping with the NuTex theme, and Security Central is really a great tool for that security operations team. So it's a big step for NuTex and security. Yeah, I just- Actually, on this one, one big piece of Security Central is you make it easier to see your various network codes and leverage the flow of micro-segmentation services and configure them on your different virtual machines. So it's really a key enabler here to kind of get a sense of what's going on in your environment. And best configure and best protect and secure infrastructure. Thomas is exactly right. In fact, one of the things I wanted to chime into, and maybe Greg, you could speak a little bit more about it. One of my favorite announcements that we heard, or at least I heard, was the virtualized networking. And coming from a cloud-native world, I think that's a big deal, the ability to go create your virtual private cloud or VPCs and subnets and then be able to do it across multiple clouds. That's something I think has been a long time coming. So I was personally very, very pleased to hear that as well. Greg, do you want to add a little bit more to that? Yeah, that's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, talking about micro-segmentation, that's one form of isolation. But what we've announced is virtual networking. So we really adopted some cloud principles, specifically virtual private clouds, constructs that we can now bring into private cloud data centers. So this gives our customers the ability to define and deploy virtual networks or overlays that sort of sit on top of broadcast domains and VLANs. And it provides isolation for different environments. So a number of great use cases. We see HCI specifically being relied upon for fast provisioning in new environments. But to date, the network has always been sort of an impediment to that. We're sort of stuck with physical network plants, switches and routers. So virtual networking allows us to do, is through APIs, is to create an isolated network, a virtual private cloud, on a self-service basis. This is great for organizations that are increasingly operating as service providers. And they need that tenant level segmentation. It's also good for developers who need isolated workspace and they want to spin it up quickly. So we see a lot of great use cases for virtual networks and it just sort of adds to our full stack. So we've software-defined compute, we've software-defined storage. Now we're completing that with software-defining networking. Right, and if I have it right in my notes, the virtual networking, that's in preview today, correct? Yes, yeah, we announced it this week and we are announcing up-came and availability. So we have a number of customers who are already working with us to help define it and ready to put it into their environments. The virtual private network is upcoming from Nutanix. Yeah, so I absolutely, you know, I've got a motor car, I've got a special place in my heart for the networking piece, that's where a lot of my background is. But there was a different announcement that got a little bit more of my attention and Thomas we're going to turn to you to talk a little bit more about clusters. I got to speak with Monica and Tarkin ahead of the conference when you had the announcement with AWS. For releasing Nutanix clusters and, you know, this is something we've been watching for a bit when you talk about the multi-cloud messaging and how you're taking the Nutanix software and extending it even further, that run anywhere that you talk about in the conference. So Thomas, if you could just walk us through the announcements, as I said, something we've been excited. I've been watching this closely for the last couple of years with Nutanix and great to see some of the pieces really starting to accelerate. No, absolutely, and as you said, this is something that's been core to the strategy in terms of getting and then having customers to go and do more with hybrid cloud and magic cloud. And if you go back, you know, a few weeks when we announced clusters on AWS, this was two weeks back now, we talked of, look, HCI is a prerequisite to getting the most of your hybrid cloud infrastructure, which is the new HCI in our mind. And what we covered at dot next was these great announcements with Microsoft Azure and just leveraging now their technologies, bringing some of their control pain onto our cloud platform, but also now having clusters on Azure and announcing that we'll be delivering this in a few months. And even customers now to go and take the same Nutanix cloud platform, the same consistency of operations and technology services from data center services, DevOps services and desktop services and deploying those anywhere on premises, on AWS or on Microsoft Azure. And again, for us, right, cloud is not a destination. This is not, and now we just accomplished something. This is, it's a new way of operating, right? And so it's touching, giving customers options in terms of where they want to go to buy. So we keep on adding new clouds as we go, but also it's a different way of consuming the structure, right, from an economic perspective. You probably know, Nutanix has been very aggressive in terms of moving to a subscription-based offering on all of our solutions and our entire portfolio. And as we go and enable these clusters offering, we're now making consumption more granular, right? To learn customers to go now consume our software on an hourly basis or a monthly basis. So again, this is kind of that next step of cloud is not just technology, it's not a destination, it's a new way of operating and consuming technology. Yeah, and what I think about the flexibility that this brings to existing Nutanix customers, it gives them enormous choices in terms of new infrastructure and why they set up new clusters. So think about Nutanix customer today. They may have data centers throughout the US or in Europe and Asia Pacific, but now they have a choice. Rather than employ their next Nutanix environment in existing data center or COLO, they can put it into AWS and they can manage exactly the same. So for us, it just provides near infinite choice for our customers of how they deploy HCI in our full software stack. In addition to the consumption that Thomas talked about, consumption choices. Yeah, just to add to that, again, I should have said this is also one of my favorite announcements as well. But yesterday, Greg, myself, Thomas, we were talking to some industry analysts and they were talking about, hey, you know how there is a need for pods where you have compute, you have network and you have storage altogether. And now people want to run it across multiple different destinations, but they have to have the freedom of choice. Today, using one different kind of a hardware, tomorrow you want to use something else, there should be portability for that. So with clusters, I think what we have been able to do is to take that concept and apply it across public cloud. So the same, you know, whether you want to call it a pod or whatever, but compute, storage, networking, now you have the freedom of choice of choosing a public cloud as an endpoint where you want to run it. So absolutely one of those, I would say game-changing announcements that we have made more recently. Yeah, well, to close that loop, actually, and talk about portability, right, there's enabling portability of applications, right? But also one thing that's really unique in terms of how we're delivering this to customers is portability of licenses, right? The fact that you have a substitution term license for on-premises, you can very easily now reapply that license if you decide to move a workload and move a cluster from on-premises to your cloud of choice, whether that's the real measure that license is also portable. But so again, full flexibility for those customers, right? Freedom of choice from a technology perspective but also a business perspective. One of the things I think that really brings home, you know, how real this solution is, it's not just about location. Thomas, as you said, it's not about a destination, but it's about what you can do with those workloads. So, one of the use cases I saw during the conference was talking about a very long partner of Nutanix Citrix and how that plays out in this clusters type of environment. So maybe if you could just illustrate that as one of those proof points as to how customers can leverage the variety of choice. Yeah, we're very excited about this one, right? Because given what we're currently going through as humanity right now across the world the COVID situation and the fact that we all have now to stop looking at working from home, enabling scaling of existing infrastructure and doing it without having to go and rethink your design, right? Which is really what we're enabling with clusters and our Citrix solution is just paramount because what it allows you to do is if say you started and you had an existing VDI solution on premises using Citrix, extending that now and deploying new capacity in any location where you can go and spin this up in any AWS region or Azure region, now allows you to go and the same images, the same processes, the same operations of your desktop infrastructure would apply regardless of where you're opening now your workforce to work remotely. And this is again, it's about making this very easy and keeping that consistency of operations from managing the desktops to managing that core infrastructure that is now enabled by using different clusters on Azure or AWS. Well, Thomas, back in a previous answer, I thought you were teeing something up when you said we will be entering a new era. So when you talk about workloads that are going to the cloud, you talk about modernization, probably the hottest area that we have conversations with practitioners on is what's happening in the database world. Of course, there's migrations, there's lots of new databases on there and Nutanix era is helping in that piece. So maybe if we could, it's kind of a final workload to talk about how that's expanding and what updates you have for the database. Absolutely, absolutely. And so, I mean, ARI is one of our key offerings, right? When it comes to database automation and really enabling teams to start delivering database as a service to their own end users. We just announced era 2.0, right? Which is now basically taking ARI to a whole other level, allowing you to go and manage your databases across clusters. And this is very typical in this current use case because we're talking of now I can use ARI to go and manage the database that might be running on premises for production and using ARI to spin up loans for test dev, for any team anywhere, potentially in cloud, right? And using clusters on your cloud environments. So those use cases of being able to go and leverage the power of the core HCI infrastructure on Nutanix for storage management, storage efficiency, but also performance, right? And scale, doing that on premises and in any cloud region that you may want to leverage using ARI for all the automation and ensuring that you keep on with your best practices in terms of deploying and acting your databases is really critical. So ARI 2.0, great use cases here to go and just streamline how you onboard databases on top of HCI, whether you're doing HCI on premises or HCI in public cloud and getting full automation of those operations at any scale. Hey, Thomas mentioned performance and ARI has been a great extension to the portfolio sitting on top of our HCI. As you know, Stu, databases have long been a popular workload to run on all HCI, particularly Nutanix and it stems from scalability performance. A lot of what I talked about earlier in terms of providing that really low latency to support the IOPS, to support the transactions per second that are needed for these very demanding databases. Our customers have had great success running, as said, Dehana, Oracle, SQL Server. So I think it's a commotion of ARI and what we're doing at Thomas'scribe, as well as just a rock solid, foundational HCI platform to run it on. And so that's what we're very excited about to go forward in the database world. Wonderful. Well, look, we covered a lot of ground here. I know we probably didn't hit everything there, but it's been amazing to watch Nutanix really going from simplicity at its core and software driving it, to now that really spiders out and touches a lot of pieces. So I'll give you just kind of a final word as you having conversations with your customers. How do they think of Nutanix today? And expect we have a little bit of diversity and the answers, but it's one of those questions I think the last couple of years you've asked when people register for .next. So I'm curious to hear what you think on that. Meg, Greg, if we start with you and kind of go down the line. Yeah, for me, what sums it up is Nutanix makes IT simple, it makes IT invisible, and it allows professionals to move away from the care and feeding infrastructure and really spend more time with the applications and services that power their business. And I agree with Greg, I think there are two things that always come up. One is the freedom of choice, the ability for our customers to be able to do so many different things, have so many more choices, and we continue to do that every time we add something new or we announce something new. And then just to add onto what Greg said is to try and make the complexities invisible. So if there are multiple layers, abstract them out so that our customers are really focused on doing things that really matter versus trying to manage all the other underlying layers which adds more complexity. Yeah, if I could just kind of sum it all up, right? In the end, Nutanix is becoming much more than HCI, right? As hyper-converged infrastructure, this is now taking it to another level with the hybrid cloud infrastructure. And when you look at what's been built over the last few years, right? And the portfolio price that we now have, I think as this growing recognition that Nutanix really delivers this cloud platform that you can now leverage to get to consistency of services, operations, and business operations in any location, on-premises, through our network of search providers, through our Nutanix cloud offerings, and hyperscalers with Nutanix clusters. So I think things are really changing. The company is getting to a whole other level. And I can be more excited about what's coming out now the next few years as we keep on building and getting knocked at that point. Yeah, and I'll just add my perspective as a long-time watcher of Nutanix for so long, IT was the organization where you typically got an enter of no, or they were very slow to be able to react on it. It was actually a quote from Alan Cohen at the first .nextdown in Miami. He said, right, we need to take those no's and those slows and get them to say go. So the ultimate what we need is, of course, reacting to the business, taking those people, eliminating some of the things that were burdensome or took up too much time, and you're freeing them up to be able to really create value for the business. So I want to thank Greg, Madhavkar, Thomas, thank you so much for helping us wrap up. Cube is always thrilled to be able to participate in .next, great community, customers really engaged and great to talk with all three of you. Thank you. Thank you too. All right, so that's a rack for theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix global .next digital experience. Go to thecube.com, you can go see, I'm sorry, thecube.net is the website where you can go see all of the previous interviews we've done with the executives, the partners, the customers, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.