 So welcome to the special of Nutanix.next coverage, theCUBE. We're in our remote studios in Napa today. Let's see two great guests talking about hybrid multi-cloud. We've got awesome Dennis, who's the senior director of product marketing. Dennis, great to see you. And Sabine Pakla, VP of product management for platform at Nutanix. Great to have you on. A lot of cool things happening with hybrid cloud. Architecture is when people want to have more cloud. They want it more invisible. They want it faster. They want it on multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. So welcome to theCUBE coverage. Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having us here. It's been a pleasure. Tendy, if I can start with you first on the, what is driving the hybrid multi-cloud architecture? Is it just the fact that there's clouds out there as are specific things that you're seeing that customers really want that's a need for their business? So you're right, John. Over the past few years, we've seen cloud investments really taking off. In fact, last year in the midst of the pandemic, when the economy was showing a downturn, cloud spending was up by 30%. So organizations are looking at cloud for speed, for scale, for elasticity, and for app modernization. However, the same organizations will also tell you that there are some workloads that will continue to stay on-prem, either in the near term or permanently. So what they're really talking about is this notion of hybrid cloud, which is interoperability between their on-prem investments, their existing investments, and their public cloud investments. In fact, I would say Gartner in 2020, they did a survey and 75% of organizations actually talked about hybrid cloud being the preferred IT operating model. And an overwhelming majority of those 80% who had public cloud in their infrastructure, they had two or more public cloud providers in their space. So that's the multi-cloud aspect of it. So whether it's happening as a happenstance or it's a deliberate IT strategy, what we are seeing organizations take on is this hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure. It's interesting. It's so funny to see the dynamics of the evolution because it's like, oh yeah, I want more cloud. I want more cloud. I want more cloud. Wait a minute, I want to give up the on-premises piece. We've got Amazon. We've got, okay, we've got multiple things happening. How do you pull it all together? So Savina, I got to ask you the blockers. What is holding back? Because I mean, it's kind of like it happened, right? People are replatforming with cloud. They're not giving up their data centers and or the on-premises component. What's the blockers? It's inertia, is it time? Is it evolution? Is it skills? What's holding everyone back? Yeah, you know, John, over the last several months, quarters, what we have seen is that there are four typical issues that sort of come up when customers start to look at their hybrid multi-cloud journey. The first one is, how do I move my on-prem applications workloads to public cloud? Do I need to refactor the applications as I do that? How do I move that application from one cloud to the other and potentially move it back to the data center? And because the underlying platform are disparate between these different destinations, it's usually very challenging. The next question then you come up with is, hey, after I move the application to the public cloud, what about management, right? It's going to be different. It has its own island of infrastructure. The management tooling is different. The skillsets required at different processes are different. So that becomes another challenge. Then comes the service levels. I still, I'm still responsible for all the service levels from backup perspective, DR security performance that I was responsible for on-prem. I'm still responsible for those in the public cloud. And then lastly, I would say, customers want to know that their investment is protected. As they move the workloads all around, they want to know that the licenses will follow them. They can actually take advantage of the licenses they've already procured and not have to procure something new just around the same workload. So those are some of the challenges that we've seen come up. It's always good to chat with you guys because I remember covering Nutanix back in 2010. It was kind of a new thing and everyone got on the same bandwagon copied that the hyperconvergence and it was very instant when the whole nother level. It seems now there's another inflection point. You want to get your reaction tenuous. You can weigh in that be great too and get your reaction as well. This whole shift from design thinking, which has been great for a decade or so to there's a whole nother kind of conversation around system thinking. And systems thinking is about platforms and it's about outcomes. But now what you guys are discussing and launching this year.next is, it's a systems concept. It's distributed computing. This is kind of a new kind of mindset. How do you guys see that evolving in the customer base? And how do you talk about that? Because this is something that is coming up kind of like that design thinking mantra. It's like systems thinking, think about the impacts. Can you guys weigh in on your reactions to that? Sure, yeah. So when you look at the systems level problem, it's really that of having the same platform, be available at multiple locations wherever you want to run your workloads. That's sort of the underpinning or the foundation if you will of your system. And we've done just that with clusters. We have basically taken our hyperconverge infrastructure stack plus the hypervisor plus the management stack, that was running on-prem and we have essentially made it available on the public cloud, right? So that's really the special thing about that is that it's a single infrastructure and single management plane across your private cloud and your public cloud, which really helps organizations to accelerate the hybrid cloud journey. And it was the impact for customers. If you have that single layer, it's unified. Yeah, I mean, it's the problems and the challenges that it just mentioned earlier, customers will be able to address all of them with by leveraging something like clusters, right? Customers will be able to deploy their workloads on private cloud or public cloud without having to have disparate management models, right? They can have a single, simple and consistent management model between private cloud and public cloud. They would be able to meet the same service levels that they've been able to on-premise, whether it's DR, whether it's backup, whether it's security, whether it's performance and all along knowing that their investment is protected with Nutanix, as you know, we have licensed portability of all our software licenses between private and public cloud. So these are all the benefits that are very real and you know, customers really value when they think about the overall problem statement they have at hand. And what's your reaction to systems mindset, system thinking in terms of customers and other holistically looking at hybrid cloud? Yeah, so John, as you talked about, right, we started from a place of making infrastructure invisible, just taking away that complexity of infrastructure. And now we have evolved it to the next level where we're really making clouds invisible. This whole idea of you could be sitting on any cloud, you could be private cloud, it could be any public cloud or multiple public clouds. You don't have to worry about the complexity. There's the software layer that's sitting on top of that, that's really making that underlying layer invisible to you so that you can just get about doing your job. It's all about business outcome at the end of the day. By the way, I love the invisible mindset because that's also like, that's what DevOps infrastructure code was supposed to be. Make things invisible, make them programmable and you got to see serverless and functions coming out. People are really getting excited by the ease of ability to just provision resources. This is a major wave that's going to have a major impact to enterprises. How is this specifically impacting this hybrid cloud architecture? What do you guys do to make that invisible? Cause customers are all like, no one's denying it's happening. They know, like, okay, we know what's happening. But they don't know what to do. How do I start? Who do I hire? What do I change? What do I automate? These are questions. How do you guys see that? Yeah, look, I think customers routinely tell us that, hey, ultimately I invest a lot in really making my enterprise IT repeatable, reliable and predictable, right? So after they've invested in the process, the tooling, the people, they want to be able to leverage that regardless of where the IT direction takes them. When it comes to public cloud, they want to be able to take the same investment that they've made and be able to leverage that and capitalize that on the public cloud. And that's really, you know, the problem statement that we really focused on, just making sure that to your point, making the infrastructure invisible has to do with, you know, having a platform that hides all the complexity underneath and provides a simple, consistent, you know, framework, if you will, for the applications and the management, the people and the tooling. So I mean, talk about Nutanix clusters. What's that about? What's the value? What's the pitch there? What's it all about? Yeah, in a nutshell, you know, clusters is simply Nutanix offers back delivered on public cloud. Really, it's a, it includes our ECI for the AWS hypercondition infrastructure, the HV hypervisor and Prism Management Plane. And it's the same stack that we have been, that we actually introduced 10 years ago, run by thousands of customers and they've taken the exact same reliable, baked stack and we're available on the public cloud. And with that, you know, customers get some of those benefits that we talked about earlier. And then talk about the use cases because everyone's talking about day one, day two operations, shift left for security. If I bring that stack into the cloud, what is the use cases that emerges for the customer? Yeah, so John, there are definitely some patterns that have emerged with customers who go hybrid cloud. In fact, our viewers won't be surprised to hear that disaster recovery is foremost. A lot of organizations are starting with disaster recovery on public cloud with Nutanix clusters. This helps them avoid maintenance and investments in a secondary data center, just purely for disaster recovery. But it also gives them geographical separation and it gives them the regional cloud options so that they can still meet their data residency requirement, which as you know, is very key for especially companies based in EMEA. Interestingly, most of these organizations that are looking at disaster recovery in public cloud using Nutanix clusters are also leveraging their investments in clusters and their cloud instances to drive capacity bursting. So using it for death test or seasonal on demand bursting. So when you're not using it for failover for disaster recovery, the same cloud investments are being optimized for cloud capacity bursting. And then finally, there's workload migration, right? So either it's for data center consolidation or migration or for app modernization, our customers are looking to migrate some of the workloads to the cloud, but they want to do that quickly or in a timely fashion. So the idea is that you migrate them as is without any app refactoring right away with clusters. And then once you're on the cloud, then you can refactor at your own base. You can modernize some components of your applications on an as needed basis. So those are the three use cases that we are seeing disaster recovery, capacity bursting, workload migration, but then to your point about day one and day two operations, day two operations are really, really key when you have public cloud investments, private cloud investments and multiple public clouds in the mix, it could be really complex to have your IT operations in play, right? So this notion that Savina alluded to earlier of a unified infrastructure and management plane that oversees your public cloud, multiple public cloud and private cloud infrastructure as well as provide operations, not just for your VMs, but also for your containers and storage is key for our customers. So this whole notion of using up on day zero and day one operations, but also day two and day N operations is top of mind for our customers. That's really well put. I think that tying that layer, that horizontally scalable control plane, whatever you wanna call it, really creates a lot of value from the blocking and tackling meat and potatoes, disaster recovery to enabling the migration and replatforming and then refactoring of those apps. I mean, this is the modernization trend. This is what people are talking about. So this is what people want. This is hard to do and seems hard. Maybe it's easier with you guys. What's holding it all back? Because I'm sold. I mean, I've been preaching against for years, like this is finally coming at scale. And then is it multi-cloud that's the bottleneck or is that not yet fleshed out? Is it more architectures are not ready? The containerization or the stateful data apps aren't the tools aren't there? Can you guys give me a sense of why it's not going faster or is it going faster? Yeah, so maybe I'll chime in and let Tanu add as well. So we introduced clusters late last year and we have seen a lot of momentum and ton of interest from a customer base. And for the use cases that Tanu just talked about, it's not already happening. There are many customers that are already well on their hybrid multi-cloud journey. And ultimately it comes down to just where the organization is in their journey. And especially if you're a Nutanix customer, very familiar with the stack, for them taking the next step, taking with clusters in AWS is actually not that big of a jump, right? And, but if you're not on the platform, then some of the challenges we discussed earlier are the things that get in the way. It's almost like day one operations, Tanu, is like innovation and day two operations is rain it in, get the value. Day one, go and do some experimentation and day two make it all operate cleanly. I think. You know, oftentimes, you know, we have conversations, even in the first or second conversation, the topic gravitates towards app refactoring. When, you know, that is a much more heavyweight and complex time consuming project. You can actually get to cloud without app refactoring and do it at your own pace and you know, on your own terms, really. I think the migration thing is a huge thing. I mean, I see a lot of that. And then once they get to the cloud, they go, wow, I could do a lot more here. And it just spawns more. It's a step function value there. And then as open source continues to grow, oh my, it's just a successful way. Don't overthink it. Just get to the cloud, understand the distributed nature of the on premise piece and boom, then go from there. You see that accelerated value extraction. And as Tanu said earlier, I mean, we are taking a much more of a holistic and not leveled view of management in this hybrid multi-cloud environment, including non-neutonics environments, right? So we're not stopping at just the Nutanix environments or just VMs. We're talking about containers. We're talking multi-cloud. We're also talking about non-neutonics environments that you may have and give you that one sort of, one single class, if you will, right? It's DevOps happening. The dev has always been there. Now the OS is getting stronger and stronger. Now it's changing too. The intelligent edge is around the corner. That's just another edge. It's another premise in my mind. So again, this flexes with what you guys are thinking about. So I think the edge brings up a lot of action too. Big time. Exciting news. Let's get into the news. So you guys have some exciting news. Talk about what's new. What's the big stories? What's breaking? What's exciting? What's the top stories coming this year? Sure, sure. So since we launched clusters late last year on AWS, we have focused on a couple of things. One is expanding the availability, right? So we have added multiple regions. Now the total number of regions, AWS regions that we support is 23. We also recently added support for AWS GovCloud for our US federal customers. And we have FedRAMP, moderate authorization. So that's, which is very key for that customer base. We've also added some really new and exciting capabilities such as Elastic DR, some of that Thanu already mentioned. Hibernate and Resume, which is a very unique capability from clusters where you can hibernate entire clusters and give up all the bare metal nodes or compute, but still have your data intact in S3, just so you can resume it very quickly whenever the need arises again. And last but not the least, we are super excited about bringing clusters to Microsoft Azure. This has been a long and strong partnership with Microsoft. And as you heard in the keynote, we are actually starting the preview at this event and opening up to the customer so that they can get their first hand free for the product and work with us in bringing the product to GA. Multi-cloud world. Oh, sorry, Dan. No, so this is exactly what I was going to say. This is multi-cloud coming to bear, right? So we talked about hybrid cloud and now here we are with multi-cloud options for you. What's interesting is that everyone always, as the trends change, this is changing, that company's shifting and you guys have evolved beautifully. And I think the way people are leveraging cloud really shows their strengths. Everyone, the cloud actually highlights the strengths. If you play it properly, you can survive. I mean, look at Snowflake, they don't even have a cloud. They're a data cloud now. So if customers can bring their architecture to the cloud, they can actually do a lot of re-architecting and re-changing and modernizing their business. This is something that's kind of, only in the past few years that's come up. This is quite a big trend. Do you guys see the same thing happening faster or is it just we're inside the ropes and we love it so much? Like I said earlier, organizations that are at different levels of the journey, but we're seeing happening all around us and we're embracing that. We're actually embracing that trend, enabling that trend because we truly believe hybrid cloud is the more practical reality and we want customers to have the cloud on their own terms and not feel like they have to do something just because they're forced to or they're not able to cost effectively or even technically for that matter. Okay, well, go ahead, Tendon, sorry. I was just going to say that RCE or Rajeev Ramaswamy puts it really well, the cloud is really an operating model, right? So it really should not be about where your workloads are residing. It should just be an easy operational model for you to engage with. Yeah, I think you guys have a great strategy. I think the invisible really brings true with me as well as that horizontally-scaled control plane because the innovation is happening but the operations have to be reined in and support the expansion as well, which means you have to kind of focus on the fact that you got to rein in the data and you got to make it invisible. If you look at Lambda functions and you got serverless trend booming with the edge, it's got to be invisible and programmable. It just has to be. Exactly, yeah. Great stuff. All right, final question for you both. If you don't mind, Tendon, we'll start with you. What's the big story this year at Dotnext? If you had to summarize it and tell your friend that you're driving in the elevator up to the top floor, what's the big story that should be talked about that's being talked about this year at Dotnext? Taking unified infrastructure and management and having Azure in preview is really the big news here. So go to Nutanix.com slash Azure to learn more. Show us your interest there, sign up for a test drive. It really is a very easy way for you to experience the product and action. And you just see how simple it is to deploy a hybrid cloud with clusters on Azure and under an hour. So the final word for you. What's the big news? What's the takeaway? Yeah, look, I would say that, you know, your cloud on your terms is really the big news that's driving everything we're doing back in the office building products and ultimately, you know, delivering or making that whole hybrid cloud journey and reality for our customers. And then to me, thank you for coming on, sharing that commentary on theCUBE coverage. Dotnext, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having me. Thanks Raymond, John. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. More coverage, stay tuned.