 The company Nutanix was founded as the world was coming out of the financial crisis in 2009. Cloud computing was still in its infancy but it had shown the way for what was possible with automation and simplification of infrastructure, provisioning and management at scale. Now, what Nutanix did is it brought cloud concepts to data centers and created the market for hyper-converged infrastructure, a software-defined architecture that eliminated stovepipes and the heavy lifting associated with traditional compute networking and storage management. Now, in the first part of the next decade, Nutanix essentially set the standard for this new world, building a loyal customer base, reaching escape velocity and successfully going public in 2016, fast forward to 2021 and much has changed. Cloud is no longer new. Rather, it's become a staple of the digital economy. As we exit the isolation economy, the cloud is much different today. It's expanding to on-prem and out to the edge. New connections are being made in hybrid and across cloud models. And as such, connecting and managing infrastructure across these new clouds to create a facile experience for users, irrespective of where the data lives has become a major priority for organizations that don't want to waste time and money on making the plumbing work. But that's easier said than done. As the market is evolving, so is Nutanix to meet these new customer challenges and opportunities. And with me ahead of .next, the major event of the year for Nutanix customers is Monica Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Cloud Go To Market for the company. Monica, always great to see you. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you so much, Dave. I'm so happy to be here again. Okay, so you heard my little narrative up front. What's your perspective on the cloud market and where your customers are in their journey? Well, as you said, Dave, cloud is a critical enabler for rapid growth for organizations now. It's no longer just nice to have, it's become a must have for organizations to survive and thrive in this digital economy. In fact, I follow a lot of surveys that are happening around cloud adoption. And one of the key trends that's coming out is, it's no longer just about IT practitioners adopting cloud. In fact, 78% of CXOs are looking to cloud to speed up transformation of the entire businesses. 80% of business executives are looking to cloud to mitigate their risks of their companies. And 87% of the executives view cloud as critical to achieving their corporate growth goals. So what we are now realizing is that hybrid multi-cloud is becoming the preferred model, which means there is no one cloud that customers are using, they're using the right cloud for the right workload. In fact, according to Gardner Group, 81% of public cloud users are using more than two providers. So what's happening is increasingly businesses are relying on multiple public clouds and on premises to meet their needs and are looking for that flexibility and that's delivered by different cloud providers. We've done our own survey called Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, we do it every year. And 86% of respondents in the last survey said hybrid cloud is the ideal operating model. So the net net that we're hearing from our customers is cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. Customers want the right cloud for the right workload and the right applications. Okay, awesome. So the world, great setup, thank you. So the world is moving to multi-cloud. I think there's not no debate on that. And that is really the mainstream, that's the norm. Talk about where Nutanix fits into this new world. Absolutely. So we are at an inflection point as organizations are grappling with this complexity now. Obviously you can imagine, the more computing environments you use, there's complexity in running and managing those hybrid solutions across multiple clouds. When Nutanix is focused singularly on is making that cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on their business outcomes. We are solving the complexity of running and managing multiple clouds, just like we did for infrastructure and data centers, you know, a decade ago when we first started as a company. Now with the Nutanix Cloud Platform, we are enabling our customers to seamlessly connect their private and public clouds, simply move applications, data licenses across any cloud, optimize the workload placement and costs, all while leveraging a consistent set of services, tools and IT processes. So for us, it's really, really crucial that we give customers the choice to pick the hardware of their choice, the cloud of their choice, the virtual machines they wanna deploy, the containers and data, and help them realize their entire hybrid multi-cloud strategy. It's all about giving our customers that peace of mind to deploy and operate the apps and data across multiple clouds with ease and flexibility. All right, let's talk about Dotnext. I think I'm pretty sure my first Dotnext was the first one ever, which I think was 2015 was pre-IPO. The focus is obviously evolving. What's the focus this year? Well, Dotnext has evolved to become the industry's leading hybrid multi-cloud conference. It's almost here, it's taking place next week, September 20th through 23rd, and this year's event will bring together IT and cloud professionals from around the globe to explore the latest trends, solutions, best practices in hybrid multi-cloud technology. Now, we're obviously gonna feature a lot of thought leaders from within the industry as well as in general, people that impact our lives in a positive manner, and we're gonna really focus on topics around hybrid multi-cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, private cloud, app modernization, Kubernetes containers, how do you figure out which app to deploy where? So you're gonna see a lot of focus on hybrid multi-cloud solutions this year. We're gonna have lots of real world stories, hands on labs, best practices for practitioners. And again, as I said, all the tools that attendees need to go back and then put to practice some of the hybrid multi-cloud strategies that they would learn at .next. Talk a little bit more, Monica, about the what's in it for me, for attendees. What can they expect? What are they gonna be able to take away from this conference? Well, so as I said, a conference is both for business leaders and IT leaders and practitioners. So for the business leaders, as I said, they'll get to hear from the latest industry visionaries around where the world of cloud is moving to. What are the latest and greatest innovations in hybrid multi-cloud technologies? And how can they make the businesses more competitive? How can they create more business value for the organizations by using these technologies? For the IT practitioners, they will go away, as I said, learning from their peers in how they are adopting cloud. What are some of the myths around cloud computing? Get some information on deployment details and the benefits some of the peers are realizing since they moved to Nutanix, for example, or in general, since they've adopted hybrid multi-cloud solutions, they will also be able to connect with their industry peers, access demo grounds. In fact, one of the major spotlights at .next will be the test drive live. Practitioners can get hands on our technology and really test drive it during the event itself and learn how to create a hybrid cloud within an hour. Learn how to deploy a database with a click off a button, for example. So lots of great goodies there. And oh, by the way, we have some amazing external speakers as well besides our own engineers, executives, and so on. We have a whole roster of third-party speakers too. That's awesome. Now, one of the other things too is one of the ways you're able to reach escape velocity as a company is you had a strong partner ecosystem. I presume it's going to be a partner network participating as well. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for reminding me about that. Partnerships are very, very important to Nutanix. It does take a village. We have a full day dedicated to our partners and partner technology and solutions. It's called the Partner Exchange. It's on Monday, September 20th. So again, we hope that you all will participate. But also you'll see partners are embedded in our September 21st and 22nd agenda and program as well, which is the main two days of .next. So partners are, in our life and blood, they are part of our ecosystem. That's great. What's next for Nutanix as you head into 2022? Well, before I go, I do want to focus on a couple more featured speakers. So for those of you who are interested in cybersecurity, we will have Theresa Paton, who is the first female White House CIO and a leading cybersecurity expert. She'll be speaking. I'm actually interviewing her as well. We have Reshma Sojani, who's the founder of Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms. We have Gary Vaynerchuk, who's the CEO of VaynerMedia, who's an author and entrepreneur. So I do hope that folks will plan to join, if not for the core hybrid multi-cloud content, but also for these amazing speakers. And last but not least, hey, if none of this excites you, then we do have some amazing entertainment. We have John Taylor of Durand Durand and the electric Fung Duo Chromia, also headlining our day to Keynotes. Oh, fantastic, I love it. Okay, so go ahead please. Well, I was going to say, so now let me talk about, so what's next? Well, for us, what's next is really helping customers realize their full hybrid multi-cloud strategy and empower them to make the right cloud decisions. So in fact, one of the things you're going to see us launch next week is also a new brand campaign. It's called Cloud on Your Terms. And you'll see that all over, plastered all over.next. And so on, we are fully invested in our customer success to help them build, run and operate anywhere, to help them easily migrate to public cloud or stay on premises if they choose to. And ultimately, to make cloud complexity invisible for our customers. You know, cloud your way kind of thing. I love that. And I failed to mention, one of the first conferences I went to .next, I met some developers and I was like, whoa, cool. Because you guys are one of the first to really, truly do infrastructure as a code and bring that on-prem. And now it's going cross-cloud. So September 20th, you kick off the partner day. Is that right? And then the big keynote start the 21st, right? And go for the 23rd. That is correct. Awesome. Yes. And we have a lot of on-demand content as well around the keynote. So it's going to be a packed set of agenda and days. And you can choose whatever content you want to attend and participate in. Excellent. You guys always put on a great program. So go there, register. We'll see you there. Monica, always a pleasure. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. All right. And we'll see you at .next. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE.