 Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back everybody, Sunil Podias here. He's the Chief Product Officer, Chief Product Development Officer at Nutanix. Host of the keynote this morning and Benny Gill, Chief Architect at Nutanix. Welcome back, good to see you guys. Thank you, likewise. Been a great week so far. We had the analyst day yesterday. We got the Kool-Aid injection, which was great. And then really... Did you have some alcohol injection? Last night, it was good. And then the keynotes this morning, like you were saying, Sunil, how did you top last year? You announced a hypervisor, but how do you feel? Yeah, it's good actually. Obviously the feedback so far has been really good in terms of resonating with the audience in general. But I think the way we look at this we've come a long way, even in the last year, since we announced Acropolis Hypervisor, to the point that I think it's become clear what our clarity and long-term vision is, which is essentially provide the Amazon-like experience for the enterprise while enabling seamless mobility between enterprise workloads and public cloud workloads. Just so that the true North is going to be ensuring that our enterprise customers can consume the right workload on the right cloud. So Benny, one of the things about that Amazon experience is how frequently they release new features. We go to re-invent and before breakfast they've announced 20 new features, right? So the architecture of the product has to allow for very fast release cycles. Sunil was talking about the speed of release cycles. What is it about the architecture that allows you to do that? I think you have to architect first the foundational layers very carefully. For example, we looked ahead into what we wanted to build and started with ZooKeeper, Cassandra, and we have already paid the debts of building web scale early on. So now we are at a point where we have all the building blocks. Say you want to build a virtualization platform, what do you need? You need a database. So we don't have to go use a MySQL or some other database. We already have Cassandra. If you want to run a clustered environment, we already have leadership action and all that. So fundamentally the building blocks are there. Now, building new services are like Lego blocks. You just put them together and build them. And that's why you see we are innovating really fast because all the Lego blocks are actually there. So when you think about the lead, you clearly have a lead. Can we establish, we all agree you got a lead on the competition? Yes. Is that fair? We could debate about the extent of that lead. But now everybody's pivoting to hyper-converged infrastructure. And they're taking all your lines and using them in their marketing. Okay, but then you peel back the skin and you say, okay, there's more meat on the bone here than you see on the others. That said, they're throwing resources at it like crazy. They're throwing more resources at it. Allow the competition to catch up or is it this sort of small team still wins approach? Well, so it's about, see, whenever you're in a rush, you'll probably do, you know, take shortcuts, right? We had the luxury of taking our own time. Forget your fault. Right? Yeah. So, you know, you take your time, architect it right. Nobody was on our backs and say, you know, you're losing the market. We were actually there. We didn't know whether the market existed. So we built it right. So therefore it's never a good position to be in where you're actually catching up. Otherwise you'll, you know, you'll be left behind. So throwing resources is not really the solution here. It's about taking the time to build the right platform. Yeah. And I think that's one dimension of if I can call it sustainable differentiation is the luxury of doing the right thing. Because this is a architectural shift. It's not a incremental feature shift, right? The other thing is also it's the luxury of not having an incumbent base that has to be replatformed. That's right. As a business opportunity, right? So we don't have necessarily a large base of customers and a profitable margin that we have to hold ourselves accountable to. We can go full on to essentially replatform the data center in the right architectural model, right? So it's between both the luxury of having knowing competency as well as the luxury of taking the time to build the right product. I think are going to extend our lead for quite a while. So I want to make an observation and have you guys comment. So when you talk to the SaaS companies like Salesforce or even or a service now, the cloud model is transformative clearly. You talk to Amazon, the cloud model is transformative. You talk to traditional infrastructure companies. They talk cloud, but it's really not quite there. Howard showed some slides from a Gartner survey today. I liked it very much. Are you doing private cloud? Oh yeah, we're doing private cloud. And then are you doing this, are you doing automation? Are you doing self-service? And then it just goes down to 7%. You guys seem to be very close, at least as part of your true North, to actually delivering that type of cloud experience, cloud inspired experience you've been calling it on-prem. Is that a fair observation? And how close are you actually to that? Yeah, I mean, I think, I'll comment a bit and I'll have Benny chime in. I think, you know, as we've laid out, we have these three acts of the company. Hyperconversion is actually our first act. As of last year, we've transitioned from actually, you know, quote unquote, morphing the lines between virtualization and compute and storage while the rest of the industry is still focused on the first act, right? And as part of this year's announcements, we've taken our first official leap into what I would call consumer grade consumption and operations in the form of self-service, in the form of like multi-hypervisor management, a variety of operations that are multi-cloud. So I think we are in act one of the cloud innings of this company, just from a relative state of mind of where we're looking at, right? So maybe you can comment a little bit on the technologies. You know, one of the key things in cloud is first of all, it should be scale out, it should be elastic. So all that capabilities we have, where customers can pay as they grow and quickly add and remove resources, that's one, right? The other is that consumption should be frictionless. That's where we announced just today, you know, the self-service capability. So once you have frictionless consumption, that sort of mimics the benefits of cloud while you get the control that the enterprise really wants, they want to control where the data is, they want to control the costs, all that goodness was already there. So I think we'll end up in a position where the enterprise cloud, as we're talking about, might appear more meaningful and powerful for the enterprise because now they get a platform where they have control, they can also look at a future where this can control a hybrid environment, your private and the public, and allow you to do app mobility between the two. Yeah, so one of the things that's interesting to look at Nutanix is there's very few things in IT that are sticky anymore. You know, if I look at, you know, when Nutanix first came out, it was like, well, customers have their server of choice. It's like, most of your customers, first few years you were selling, didn't really care. I mean, Super Micro in there, tried Quantifer a little bit, you know, you do have OEM relationships for customers that really want it, but that doesn't matter. I know your hope is that, you know, the hypervisor becomes a feature and, you know, differentiates itself, but what will make Nutanix sticky in the environment? Because boy, if it's invisible, don't I just forget about it after a little while? It's kind of that dichotomy. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I'll have been asked with Chairman. So for us, I think our true stickiness is in the experience of operating our infrastructure. The fact that they don't have to operate it, they don't have to touch our infrastructure in itself is our core competency. That sounds a little oxymoron-ish, but the fact that we have built so much intelligence in our core fabric that our management plane is so dead-simple, versus having to actually build all this complexity in the management team, that you need 50 experts or we experts or whatever it is to actually go manage the infrastructure, right? So I think our long-term differentiation and stickiness will come from the fact that by being simple, we change the lifestyle of our end users. And once you're addicted to that lifestyle, it's very hard to kind of come back to another lifestyle. Yeah, in today's day and age, it's not necessarily the features, but the interface is what people are loyal to. Like Uber is an interface, right? Apple is an interface. If that interface changes, they might lose their user base, right? But if the features come and go, performance is up and down, it's possibly okay. So that is where we are focused heavily. We've invested quite a lot and we believe that we have a straight shot making that great interface that'll be differentiated for a long time. Yeah, I think an interesting point on that is in the keynote this morning, the biggest applause came when you talked about really the multi-hypervisor management to come in a future release, Asterix. So again, that's an example of the same features, but the interface is different and people love that interface, right? Well, it's certainly the case with Amazon, right? I mean, that's been pretty sticky. Yeah, I mean, the Amazon command, and one interesting thing I wanted to highlight even though when we say it's Amazon-inspired or Amazon-like, there's actually two aspects of Amazon. There's the AWS aspect of Amazon, which is how you build infrastructure to be consumed on demand, which is start small, start quickly, pay as you go. But the other dimension is not as explicit, but it's actually, frankly, for us, more differentiating long-term, which is the Amazon.com experience. The retail side, yeah. A one-click. Imagine every portion of your enterprise being consumed as one-click operations. And that, to us, is the secret behind the long-term strategy. One-click operation. You love one-click. You're addicted to one-click. You'll pay more for Amazon to go to one-click, right? Just for the convenience. It's a value to a consumer. To us, actually, long-term, frankly, if we can actually, while delivering cloud-dining infrastructure, but really sustain that consumer-grade interface, experience, the whole stack, I think that's going to be the true Amazon-like experience that we want. So one of the real challenges we see out there today is customers are trying to figure out where do applications live and there's some applications that have pieces on-premises versus in the public cloud. You talk about self-service. You talk about the interface. How do you work through that piece of it? How are you going to help customers? You guys don't own the applications, so why are you going to be an important piece of helping customers with this environment? Right, I mean, certain applications are more suited to the public cloud. They're elastic and we see a lot of big data applications going to the cloud. Some of it is driven because the applications that they're doing analytics on are on the cloud, so it's easy to do analytics on top of that data there. Essentially, it's about, first of all, how much it's going to cost and where. So that's one thing, whether customers want to go with the CAPEX model or the OPEX model, that makes them decide. We believe that the same set of apps can run on both sides in the long term. It would be just a business decision as to where you want to run it, also security and what's the comfort there, and also speed of light. I mean, at the end of the day, customers would say this app has to be local to my users and, you know, so those things will play out. Yeah, makes sense. Give us an example of that. Give us one click, but give us some other examples of that experience. Yeah, I mean, I think, look, we just call it under the umbrella of one click, but imagine the lifecycle of an operator's experience, right? First time install, in terms of how fast can you take the box out, rack and stack it, much like cloud, which is all you just have to go to a portal to set things up. While there is some physical aspects to rack and stacking, the fact that you can configure stuff, provision stuff, get VMs provision in minutes without having to get like 15 guys involved, that's like the first step of what we call one click provisioning. The more important as you go down the lifecycle, it becomes more visceral, which is one of the examples that I use all the time is like the first month that I was with Nutanix, couple of weeks later I fly to State of Washington, one of the large customers, the government customer, talks about existing last traditional storage visualization customer, and the architect stops me in the middle of the presentation, goes, well, wait a second. Well, do you remember when we used to call Mary and their wives and say, look, on Friday night, we got to take off center two hours, come to work, spend, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday upgrading my order management system, get the storage guy, visualization guy, networking guy involved. Well, guess what? Same system, running on eight nodes in Nutanix. Last Thursday at three o'clock we did an upgrade, it was done at three o' eight. Something simple, something unsexy like that, mundane, but it truly elevates the operational experience of those people, right? So one click upgrades is another example. One click planning, you know, we talked about that today in terms of, okay, every time we know there's a level of uneasiness as to what is the impact on infrastructure. What if the system can tell you, based on your application, you know, requirements, what the impact on your infrastructure is, and all, doing all of that in a one click planning way. So there's, I think, there's like three or four such things that are abstracted under the term one click, which essentially mean, you know, consumer grade experiences, right? So those are all things that I think as we go around the fact that you can do one click hypervisor conversion. Essentially it's not just the dueling portion, but the fact that, you know, we call it the $2 million Nutanix mug, right? Every time an ELA comes up for renewal, you just have to put them in a mug out there and then, you know, 2 million comes off your ELA, right? So, you know, call it the one click optionality of some sort. So there's a variety of those things that go into it. That was old enough to remember the Amdahl coffee cup. Oh, is that right? Yeah, so Amdahl salespeople would give the coffee cup for the IBM mainframe, right? Oh, is that right? Discount, so it's... Got it, got it, got it. Anyway, so it's the optionality, it's the optionality. Amdahl was an old mainframe company for those of you who are young folks that may not remember that. Yeah. You know, Biddy, you were talking about architecting it right, you know, not having to rush. When you go public and you have that 90 day shot clock, you guys seem to be a pretty thoughtful management team. You're hungry, but humble. Of course, IPOs have this personal financial game, but there's also corporate, there's exposure to public markets. Do you ever worry about a change in that culture? How do you, because culture's so important to Nutanix. Yeah, I think, yeah. How are you maintaining that? Again, I believe the culture starts at the top, really, in any organization. So as long as we are clear at the top that we are building this company for the long haul, we want to make the right decisions even after IPO, I think we'll be good. All right, Sunil, I'll give you the last word. We've got to wrap, get to the keynotes. The experience here, dot next. Put a wrap on it. In addition to this awesome interview here, no, I think, look, I think we're on a long journey here. And I think we're still in the early to mid innings of helping replat from the data center. We're having a lot of fun doing it, and we're here for the long haul. Because there's just so much opportunity right in front of us for the taking. So I'm looking forward to it. Biddy and Sunil, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to see you. Thank you. And thanks for having us here. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, the wrap and the keynotes, right after this word.