 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are kicking off day two of theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT Nutanix, the Nutanix show .NEXT. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside Stu Miniman, of course. Stu, the word of the day is delight. And in Copenhagen, Denmark, which is year after year voted the happiest country, the country that coined the term Huga, which means a sense of well-being. What do you think delight it means in the context of this show in particular? Yeah, so Rebecca, right. Yesterday I thought I only knew one word. I learned tack, which is thank you of course, but Huga is actually one I'd read about because it's interesting. The study of happiness, they actually have an institute here in Denmark and talk about it, as you said, the people are some of the happiest and you say, wow, it's often cold and rainy and things like that, but they do look into the study of delight. And it's something that I find pretty fascinating. I read a book by Tony Shea, who's the founder and CEO of Zappos, talked about, we all talk about where you want to go in career and what you want to do, but how do we actually understand happiness and bringing it to the Nutanix show? Definitely there was a certain joy from the community here. We've had a lot of talk with some of the practitioners, as well as some of the Nutanix employees. They want to stay customer focused. They want to build these experiences as the CEO, Dirge Pandey said, and therefore it's not about that product because so much in technology, it's that new shiny thing that we understand, well, it's never a silver bullet and there's always the repercussions and how do I have to reorganize it? Things change so fast in technology, but if I can have experience, the example used all the time is what transformed when we moved to the smartphone, revolutionized by the iPhone or so many other things that just pulled together, that simplicity that gets baked in, the design, something we've talked about, both in Denmark as well as from the Nutanix discussion. So pulling those pieces together, kind of the left brain, right brain all pulling together has been interesting and yeah, it gives kind of a highlight as to why Copenhagen was a nice place. Definitely, we've enjoyed being here at the show. Absolutely and I think you're right and we're going to be talking a lot about design today because delight is one of those, again, it's this ineffable quality. You don't know you're being delighted because you're just being delighted. It's just nice. Ease of use and Monica Kumar who we had on the show yesterday of course was talking about all of the elements that go into that, taking 10 clicks and making it an easy swipe, eliminating downtime, just an easy, intuitive use which is absolutely what goes into delighting customers. We're going to have Satish Ramachandran on the show today, talking more about design too. Tell me about the energy of the show. We're going to get into Nutanix a bit more today too but just what do you think about the energy? What's your feeling? So, there are certain shows that we go to where we know that you have the true believers at the show, splunks.conf is one where they all love the geeky t-shirts that they get and people enjoy their service now. Another one, a lot of these software companies transform the way they think and they work. So, Dave Vellante for years would tell me about that community. Community, I know well, the VMworld community, this reminds me of earlier days in VMworld. VMware is dominant in their space but there are shows not exactly, there are parties and there are friends that we get together and one of the best communities in the industry but it's a much, much bigger company when you're 60,000 people and things like that. There's not as much of the kind of smaller touch and feel, we heard from Monica yesterday she talked about right when she joined the company, somebody she knew had reached out about an issue that needed to be worked out and just seamless all swarming to solve that issue. Something I've done at some companies I've worked at where you know a team's pulling for, the customer comes first and you get things done. So, the customers here definitely are highly engaged, very excited because the experience of using the solution has made their lives easier and helped them transform their business. You know that goal of IT helping to not only support but be a driver of the business is exciting. So, exactly and this is what we're going to be talking about today too, as Nutanix, they have this passionate customer base which they will need as they are a maturing company. So now they're 10, they're hitting their tween age years. So talk a little bit about what you're seeing about Nutanix trajectory and what it needs to do to hit those next steps. Yeah, so the discussion for the last like two years has been the move from removing hardware for something that they sold, which was always it was the software that was important and Nutanix really passed along the hardware to this move to subscription and along with that it isn't just the same core AOS Nutanix software and some of the pieces that go with it but really they're expanding beyond infrastructure software to some of the application software. So yesterday we had Nikola who's the CEO of Frame. Frame is desktop as a service. So that was the type of software that sat on top of Nutanix or on top of the cloud expanding in that market. We're going to have Bala on today to talk about ARA. It's database, you know, database absolutely an application that sat on Nutanix but now they're building some of these applications. It's interesting, almost 10 years ago VMware tried to get into the application space. They bought an email company, they bought a social company and really that didn't pan out well for them. Amazon does not sell many of their, they sell some of their own applications but most of them are an open source solution that is then delivered as opposed to, you know, building applications on top of them. Building applications is the realm of Oracle and Microsoft and IBM have these. So it positions Nutanix in a little bit of different space and how much are they going to have the customers that have bought the platform that will build these services, leverage these services on top of them versus how many customers will come to them because of that application, say, oh, well, you know, database is one of those challenging things if I can just have a nice simple solution and maybe that's in the cloud or maybe it is on a Nutanix environment in their data center on their server of choice. There are some password Nutanix going forward to a much broader TAM but it's much broader competition too and, you know, they're sales force and there's go to market, there's partners. We're going to spend a little time talking about like the systems integrators today. So it is a big, vast sea out there in the IT world and Nutanix has carved out a nice position where they are today but opening up a number of areas of adjacencies that they're going. So as they ride the software wave that they're pushing, it's an interesting one to set them up for the next 10 years. Absolutely, so what do you see are the biggest headwinds facing Nutanix right now? I mean, as we've said, they have a passionate customer base. They've, on the main stage this morning, we heard about their high net promoter score. We heard about their amazing customer retention, so much repeat business. What do you think, though, is sort of the main, what should be keeping Deerage Pandy up at night? So one of the biggest challenges is your 5,000 person company. How do you keep growing at that pace? How can I hire? We heard in Europe it is a challenging market to hire. You are no longer that small startup that I'm going to get some IPO, bang for a buck. Now I'm a public company and there are stock incentives and things you can do, but Nutanix has a number of areas that they think they have exciting ways for people to be a part of some of these next waves that they're pushing, but that is a big challenge. There is really co-operation out there. We've spent a bunch of time talking about the ecosystem. They have a decent ecosystem, but their position in the cloud world is they are a player amongst many, many, many, hundreds if not thousands of companies out there. When you go to Amazon re-invent, you can find the Nutanix booth, but it's not one of the big players there. Go to the Microsoft show, go to the Google shows. They are a small piece of that, and we asked you just how do you position yourself and how do you get awareness in this environment? So when they had two down quarters, it was definitely marketing and sales where the areas that they said they could not hire fast enough, so they are going to need to invest more and they still aren't profitable. So we are almost three years past the IPO. If you look at the transition to software, their revenues have been relatively flat, their margins have been going up, but the market will not reward them if they can't keep the growth going and start getting closer to that full profitability. Exactly, exactly. Well, these are all going to be topics that we're going to dig deeper into today. We've got a great lineup of guests and then of course the final keynote speaker, one of your faves. Yeah, we'll have Kit Harrington. Rebecca, what did you think of Caroline? Caroline was naked. She was fantastic. And I think what was really exciting about the interviewer was named is... Venugabhaal Pai. Venugabhaal Pai, a friend of yours, was how he was really drawing these analogies to Nutanix Journey, similar to that of a professional athlete and that is someone who's getting knocked down and has to get back up again, someone who's winning a few things, winning some business here, but she still needed to keep her... Yeah, she made a great point where she said, right, the day after she was named, number one, her father was like, well, you need to get lower, you need to do this, and she's like, wait, I'm number one, but you have to keep working or everyone will come after you. And so Nutanix is in a strong position, but absolutely they know that they need to keep working and training and improving, listening to their customers to move forward. Absolutely, absolutely. So I think she had a lot of lessons for the Nutanix community too. So Stu, I'm excited for day two. We're going to have a lot of great customers and Nutanix people on the show today too. Yeah, looking forward to it. And they had a fun party last night. They had the DJs were bumping. They had nice international food, some art and some interesting people dressed up as hedges and fruit and things walking around. So it was a little bit weird, but a lot of fun. They're the happiest country in the world. What can we say? I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next.