 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, the CUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with D. Raj Pandey, CEO and founder of Nutanix. Great guest, been with us for 10 years, was on theCUBE in 2010 when we first started doing the CUBE coverage at events, was at VMworld. D. Raj, great to see you. Pleasure. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. You've had such a great journey. I've been so impressed with you as an entrepreneur, the hustle, the early days when you were misunderstood to the growth and going public and continuing to compete. Congratulations to you and your team. It's been great. Thank you, now it's been a journey and it's going to continue to be a journey. A lot of competitive pressure, a lot of cloud happening, a lot of server dynamics in the marketplace with on-premise now getting validated as a part of this multicloud hybrid equation, certainly not going away, but still, the cloud has been huge. What's the big focus? Because you have your Nutanix next conference coming up in May, I'll be there with theCUBE. What's the focus? What is the theme of the event? What's the big focus? Yeah, I know, in fact, we complete 10 years this September, so it's decades since the beginning of time for Nutanix. And we are focusing on the things that we are good at. We are good at what I call the 3Ds. So it's a 3D view of the company. The first D is data, we're really good at data and we're doubling on our data. We're very good at design. We've done a very good job of simplification, making it elegant, consumer grade, and taking clicks away, rather than things taking months, how can it be done in seconds and hours? And we're very good at delivery, the third D being delivery. It's not just delivery of our software through all different form factors and our appliance and software and subscription and other servers, but also customer support, customer success, which has really endeared us to our customers. So if you think about what this conference is all about, obviously it's about the customers and it's the power of social proof, the fact that they learn from each other and we learn from them, but it's really about reinforcing the 3Ds, data, design, and delivery. And the theme is invisible clouds period, visible IT, invisible clouds. So I'm assuming that's trend, make that, abstract that away, multi-cloud in there, probably a theme. Visible IT, that's supposed to be invisible too, but what does that mean, visible? I get the invisible cloud because do you want to make it seamless, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, but what's visible IT? How do those words play? What's the play on words there? Yeah, I mean, first of all, the word invisible is very powerful and we use it a lot. And it's very unique to Nutanix, not everybody uses the word invisible as much as we do, but the idea is that machine should become invisible, software and systems and tools and those things should become invisible and then human should become visible. And by the way, there's this really good antithesis sort of the polar opposites of machines versus humans that goes on in many other walks of life. I mean, zero trust when it comes to security. So machines should not trust each other, but full trust when people need to trust people. So when it's an organization of people, you need to be the opposite of zero trust. Same thing is true for invisible machines, invisible clouds, but visible people, visible careers. And I think what's happening is that as the cloud hype cycle actually matures, CIOs are talking about cloud, cloud, cloud, but the grassroots is basically saying like, do you even know the legacy apps of the last 20 years? Do you understand the challenges of what we call the laws of the land, the compliance and regulations, laws of physics, which is the gravity of data and the gravity of people and operations and laws of economics owning and renting. So I think what's happening is that the cloud revolution is really being dug like a Euro tunnel from two sides, top down from sea level people saying, let's go transform ourselves to the cloud. And we are helping the grassroots really go and translate that. So look, this is only possible by doing these things because we have to be respectful of data sovereignty, data gravity, and applications and economics of that. So in really helping the CIOs build trust with the grassroots. So essentially you're operationalizing cloud. It's like, I can hear, we've interviewed a lot of CXOs on theCUBE, as you know. Take that hill, go to the cloud, move everything to the cloud. Wait a minute, we got workloads that have been, so to make sense of that vision, it's got to be operationalized. That's kind of what you're getting at. Absolutely, and then finally there's a, I mean, look, what happens in computing? You know, we make things smaller all the time. You know, we started with mainframes and we ended up with server less. And along the way we had obviously Unix and X86 and container, VMs and containers and so on. Same thing with personal computing. We started with desktops and we ended up with variables. So the fact that there's a billion dollar data center is the new mainframe, you know. The fact that there's going to be a big cloud data center, only two places in a big country is actually quite the antithesis of computing. We have to make cloud be everywhere, you know, and make it about software. So operationalizing the cloud and making it into a half a trillion dollar market will be about software. This whole mainframe that's in the cloud or mainframe distributed computing, software and distributed computing kind of come back and vogue, doesn't go away, it's all the same game. It's just distributed out around in different formats. That's kind of what's going on. Absolutely. I mean, you need to go back in time to distribution. Apple was a vertically integrated stack. So how does Microsoft come and really compete against Apple? They said, look, PC is about software. They said, look, PC is not about hardware, it's about software. And the market becomes 10 times larger, you know, because they really bring in other partners who make money with the Windows operating system. And there's more enabling, there's more demand, there's more growth. And the same thing happens again, 15 years later with iOS versus Android. So Apple says, you know, smartphone is about a vertically integrated stack. And Google comes and says, no, to make the market 10 times larger, Android is about software. And then other handset manufacturers come and make money. So cloud is at this juncture where to take it beyond 50, 60 billion dollars to half a trillion dollars, it has to be about software. Do you realize, one of the things that I'm impressed with you as an entrepreneur and your team is, you fit the profile of the classic big idea. Be different, have good product leadership and pick a wave that's going to have a big total addressable market. You did that and you weren't, you didn't waver. So I reviewed your analyst meeting from Wikibon and a third-party analyst. 100 billion dollar addressable market, so big market check. Private cloud trend, which you called early and Stu Miniman also called that on Wikibon is not going away and you have a stack for that. Large customer base of what, 12,000? Customers plus and growing. Great revenue, strong revenue. And you got refreshes coming because the technology continues to shift in the wave that you're on. So congratulations, that's good kind of health meters. But there's now competitive pressure. The genie's out of the bottle, people don't know what you're doing. They figured it out and they're going to try to compete with you. There's economies of scale that you have, there's economies of scales others have, specifically Dell, Dell EMC, VMware have been highly competitive with you. How are you responding to that and what's the landscape look like? Yeah, you look, we've always been about disrupting ourselves. And that's the way we've actually grown our company. It's a very contrary way of thinking about it. But if you go back in time, four or five years ago, we're an appliance company and we said we're going to do an OEM relationship with Dell and then Lenovo and others. And all of a sudden people said, you're competing with yourself. And for us, it was like the more we compete with ourselves, the better it is. Today, I think if you think about where the company's real response to any competition is to really compete with ourselves. You know, I typically don't get wavered or changed by what's out there. We don't compete with anybody else. If we can keep competing with ourselves and get better in serving our customers. In these three Ds I talked about being even deeper in data. That VMware can't even touch us on. Simply because they have to compete with EMC on that. And I don't know whether they actually have the gumption to do that. We do actually. We have to be better at design, like make the control plane even simpler. Understand what it means to virtualize the cloud and get better at delivery. So if we can keep getting better at the three Ds and if we can keep competing with ourselves, we just did a really good announcement with HPE. We're going to compete with ourselves one more time. Because I think this is different. So HPE bought Nimble Storage. So they already got storage piece. They have tons of servers. They also compete with Dell. What's your position with HPE? What's the announcement? What's the partnership? Yeah, so we're going to do a two way relationship. We're going to be able to, our sellers can quote HPE servers and their sellers can actually quote our operating system. You know, we have this rainbow, which we call core essentials enterprise, Nutanix core, which is about hyperconvergence, modernize your infrastructure. Nutanix Essentials, which is how do you build a private cloud. And then Nutanix Enterprise, which is really about navigating and simplifying the multi-cloud journey of the customer. And HPE is going to take this stack towards customers. Again, we started to compete with ourselves because our appliance business was not based on HPE, but now it will. Similarly, they will compete with themselves. And that's how companies transform themselves. When they compete with themselves, rather than somebody else. And it's always the old expression. You know, each your own before your competition does, kind of cannibalization, kind of MBA concept. You guys are aggressive on that. You don't mind doing that, taking that risk. No, in fact, if we don't do it, someone else will. It's better to do it in a controlled way ourselves. That great, great manager self. So let's talk about, you mentioned control plane earlier. You have a quote on your deck that says, that I reviewed, it says, control plane matters. This speaks to some of the product leadership. What does that actually mean? The control plane matters. We hear this a lot come up in multi-cloud hybrid and certainly within the data conversation around data control planes, control planes. For you guys, what does that mean? Control plane matters. Well, if you take back like 10 years ago, we were very bold and audacious. We were the only company to say, look, we will not be building a tab in vCenter. Contrary and highly contrarian. Most people said, you lose a lot of deals because you're not a junk to vCenter. You're not a tab in vCenter. Every hardware vendor was really bending or backwards to please VMware because they thought that was the only way to the heart of the virtualization administrator. We took a very different stance. Prism was the control plane. We said, if we do a really good job with prism, make it a distributed scale out platform, make it consumer grade, one click delight, then customers will actually look at this as a very powerful thing. And then we virtualized the hypervisor. So prism was a multi-hypervisor platform. It worked for VMware, it worked for Hyper-V, and it worked for Nutanix, AHV. So over time, we've just kept doing more of it. So now we have a control plane for multi-cloud. We're saying, look, the world does need an automation orchestration engine that is multi-cloud. Calm is that thing for us. We've taken prism to the next level of prism pro, which is about ML and AI, and what does it mean to really do operations management and capacity planning and security and analytics. So we've doubled down on design, which is the second D that I talked about with these control planes. And going forward, as you see us getting to multi-cloud desktop delivery, we acquired a company almost a year ago, which is really about a cloud native desktop delivery solution where now the control plane desktops could belong in the cloud, but the desktop itself could be running on-prem. And that's a very powerful concept that you can have these cloud-enabled, cloud-hosted, cloud-serviced control planes, but the data plane could actually be anywhere. It could be running anywhere. This is the invisible cloud concept you're talking about. Absolutely, yeah. In fact, the fact that the controller could be running anywhere and the thing it controls could be running someplace else. The question, that's great stuff and that's great product leadership. Again, invisible cloud people don't want to do with multiple code bases. They want to have seamless operations. So with that, I got to ask you your cloud positioning because every enterprise now, because it's from the top end down, it's a top imperative. What's the cloud positioning? Because we now see on-prem is super important. AWS has got Outpost. The data is going to reside on-prem and the cloud is all going to move around. What is the cloud positioning that you talk to your customers about when they say, hey, you know, we'd like Nutanix, but we got to go to cloud. What's the positioning? Well, our positioning is that cloud has to be about software. It has to seep everywhere. It has to be injected everywhere. Our software should run not just on-prem, but in an AWS bare metal, you know, there's a bare metal service and our software should run there. There'll be an Azure bare metal. You know, we already run in GCP metal. So, you know, our software can run on top of GCP as well. And of course, if there's on-prem and we're already working on our own disaster recovery of service, desktop of the service, where we become the service provider for many of these hybrid services that customers actually need from us. So cloud is about ubiquity. It's about portability. I mean, the strength of any software company is portability. If we can make ourselves available in every server, every hypervisor, and every cloud, I think we've done a very good job. My final question I want to ask you is when you go to your event coming up, Invisible Clouds, Invisible IT, you got to give the customer the 20-mile stare. You got to show them the 20-mile vision and the bridge to the future that they want to cross with you, as that's the main value every company has to do as CEO. What is that story? What's the pitch to the customer saying, you know, we got you covered today as you're organically building that operational cloud path. But I really want to know that I have a partner for the next generation. What's the story that you tell them? Yeah, I mean, you know, as I said before, you know, any big project, you know, whether it's Panama Canal, Suez Canal, Euro Tunnel, you have to dig it from both sides. And then you eventually shake hands and it becomes a historic picture, you know, which is what we've known about the way the English side and the French side met. I think the way CIOs are talking about the cloud, the way grassroots is perceiving what the cloud is, as you call it, operationalizing. I think we have to really do it from both sides. And we really go and talk about the 3Ds, data, you know, we've done so well in data, we've done so well in design, we've done so well in delivery. And then at times we've actually screwed up, like, you know, in the last two, three, four years, we might have gotten more complicated, we might have gotten more complex. So we go and even ask for forgiveness and open ourselves up, you know, talk about the vulnerability of the company. And people like that, they didn't want to connect to not a machine, but they want to connect to humans on this other side. As a business, we're not machines, we're actually humans, you know. And that's what resonates in this conference. T. Rush, thanks for coming in, sharing your insight. Great to see you again. Congratulations on the business performance. We'll see you at Nutanix Next in May, May 7th. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. My pleasure. I'm John Furrier here at Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching.