 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. 20,000 people plus in attendance here at VMworld 2018. VMworld's 20 years in business. I believe it's their 15th year of VMworld. It's our ninth year of doing theCUBE here. Double action, two sets. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host for this segment, the one, the only, Alan Cohen, who's got a long story to history, both with the VMware ecosystem as well as my next guest. So welcome back to the program. Ben Gibson, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Nutanix. Great to see you. Stu, thanks for having me and Alan, great to see you. Pleasure, Ben. All right, we're not going to let you guys, reminisce about old times. We're going to be talking about customers, what's going on today. Ben, your team's got a big presence here. Obviously, virtualization, hyperconvergence, enterprise cloud, all big themes of the conference. Tell us a little bit about what your team's got going on this week. First of all, thanks for having me and it's great to be here at VMworld. This is a very important event for us. A good deal of our customers are customers of Nutanix and customers of VMware. And we have a lot of, we see a lot of great projects. We see a lot of key requirements that we are compelled to work better together with VMware. And so it's good to be here at the show and get that done. Yeah, some of the themes in the show, wow, we're talking about infrastructure and cloud and that mixing out. I was really struck this morning, second year in a row, Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger talking on stage, talking about how customers are moving back and forth. Amazon starting to put some of their services in VMs. Nutanix, tell us what you're hearing from customers when you talk about kind of that maturation of, I don't think Nutanix ever branded themselves as a hyperconverge company, but enterprise clouds the messaging. What are you hearing from customers as they look at this digital transformation and transition from legacy to how cloud and hybrid cloud fit into everything? Yeah, you know, Stu, it's definitely a big theme not only at this show, but we hear it from our customers too. And I think what we're seeing a lot of is a demand for our customers to run different workloads on the right cloud platform with the right SLA, with the right cost model. This is something we hear a lot about and it really drives a lot of our innovation efforts is focusing on how can our customers run the right workload, whether it be on a Nutanix private cloud, but increasingly to help our customers make the decision what kind of cloud they want to run into. I like to kind of call it the democratization of cloud, right, pick the right cloud environment for the right workload and even get some mobility in between them and you put that all together and I think that's where the market's headed. And maybe to follow on that, Ben, I think Stu raises probably the key point of the event. If you were to look back, let's say a year ago, right? Because both at Nutanix, but also VMware and I think it's great that marking this, you know, Andy Jassy was here a year ago, he's back. If you knew what you knew now, what would be different about maybe the approach of helping people make these migrations and work in this hybrid environment? Like what are the real learnings for the end customers in this environment? Yeah, I think recognizing if I were new now, what I knew then, I think Nutanix would have been even more aggressive moving into the whole space. We have a product called Calm. It's about how can we automate application management across different cloud environments. We're starting to see that really take off now. You can always say you wish you were a year or two earlier, but we feel like we're hitting that just right. I think it's also this notion of customers getting away from lift and shift because it was too hard, right? And so there's a lot of great innovation. Our CEO, Deera, she talks a lot about making infrastructure invisible, and we think we've achieved that awfully well with our innovation. How do you make clouds invisible? Not go away, but how do you make clouds invisible? All the complexity of managing these different environments. I think there's a tremendous amount of value that can be delivered to make that a lot easier because customers need it. Yeah, one of the things I'm happy to see is a couple of years ago, there were a lot of people I talked to with shows like this that was like, oh wait, the cloud's going to kill my job, or I'm worried and I'm fearful. Now when I talk to people is they're like, I'm concerned that maybe I'm a little bit far behind that I'm not moving. I can't keep up with change fast enough. What advice do you give customers? What are you hearing from the users that you talk to? Yeah, we've recently done some primary research and what we've heard from the market is close to 92% of who we surveyed, they want to move to these hybrid cloud environments. And as that trend's happening, it really poses a question for many of the IT professionals out there, what's the evolution of my job, right? And the last couple of years, maybe there's more fear factor out there about it. What we're seeing with forward-leaning customers, the ones that are really on top of this, they may feel like their organization's behind, but they're getting ahead of that with their career, their aptitude, the training, what they have. And the notion is how can someone who maybe three or four years ago manage a great on-premise data center turn into the great bridge between a DevOps community and managing a modernized data center environment. So there's a lot more connection. So I like this theme, let's unpack it a little bit more. So, what are, when you talk, when you look at your customers, what do you think the, I mean, so you talked about some of the training, what other inhibitors do they really have? I mean, so, I mean, how much of this is in their minds and how much of this is in their environments? And, you know, in trying to take advantage, like, so when I think about this, ultimately it's going to be a mobius strip. You're going to have a data center, you're going to have a cloud, you're going to have applications that run across it. And if it's done well, you won't really even know. It'll be optimized based on where it's better to run. But before you get there, there's some things that are probably in the way. And you talked about one is, you know, skill set. Are there other things? You know, are there any technical inhibitors that you guys see that stop them from making the migration? I think there definitely are. I think what really fueled this company's growth in the earlier years was helping our customers get over hurdles of just cheerfully managing a tremendous amount of legacy environment. And so 90% plus of IT man hours time being spent on maintaining a lot of legacy infrastructure, upgrades across storage that were compute. And so the whole notion of hyperconverge, it was really about how do you make a lot of that go away or be invisible? But then you can take that same concept and move that forward now. So different workloads, right? Mode one workloads, mode two workloads that are emerging here. And some of the inhibitors is actually relationship based, right? So the infrastructure folks talk to the app developers, talk to the DevOps practices that may be going around IT. Say, hey, I'm going to light up this new app and there may be customer data involved, all that stuff, maybe without adult supervision, lighting it up somewhere. And it's an opportunity, I think, for IT to get back in relevant again in this whole equation. But to do so it requires them to have some new relationships even within their own walls that they haven't had before. Ben, one of the things that really has impressed me over the last year or so when I've been talking to your customers is if you turn back a couple of years ago, it was okay, well, I had a new packaging for my virtualized applications. But I was really running the same apps in just a new platform. But once they modernized the platform, then they started to do cool things to modernize the applications on top of it. And I've seen through some acquisitions and some talent that Nutanix is building. You're starting to work up the stack a little bit more. You mentioned Calm. Talk about some of the adjacencies and expansions and what does the Nutanix of 2020 look like? Yeah, we've really been racing towards broadening the portfolio, moving into some different adjacencies. You know, one big topic right now is multi-cloud. Right, actually, you know, I saw an announcement from VMware here this week that was along these lines. Back a few months ago, we acquired a company called Minjar in, product called Beam. The idea there is how to bring context and visibility into your cloud usage and your cloud spend and how do you get smarter about leveraging the right cloud platform? That's a big area. We rolled out a new database as a platform service. So this is the idea, we start to build up and go up the stack here where we have a lot of customers saying, gosh, can you make the management of my Oracle database implementation just as easy as it is to manage my infrastructure with you? And so through copy data management services and the like and others, we're able to take that new offering and start to bring that same consumer grade simplicity, one click simplicity that we brought to converging infrastructure now to managing databases, to moving up and managing cloud environments. So it's an exciting move for us, but it also presents us with fascinating new challenges, right? How do we start to engage with often someone who's a different decision maker or buyer? Well, you know, on that front, I would be remiss not to ask this. So one of the, some of the announcements that have been coming out of VMware recently are very security related, right? Because security had been a huge inhibitor for enterprise cloud workload migration. How do you see that from a Nutanix customer point of view? How do you guys run into these security issues? Yeah, I think it's... And I have some good answers for you, but I'm sure you have some of your own. I'm shocked you have good answers on this one. Yeah, obviously it's critical, right? You can't talk about moving workloads back and forth or other places without security being a number one consideration. And it's often a key consideration why you want to make sure you have the right cloud platform or the right environment. It's something that we organically care about. We rolled out what's called Flow that's focused in area you're very familiar with and microsegmentation. But it's also about ecosystem. We're a very active open company when it comes to this. And there's no shortage of very innovative companies out there on the security front that we are very active in co-developing with to make sure that there's a broader picture in place there. All right, so Ben, give us a little bit of view forward as to what we should be looking for from Nutanix. Yeah, well, first of all, I think in the core hyper-convergence infrastructure market that we're in, I think we're just now starting to see a tipping point. As exciting as that market's been, I think you're going to see more and more customers start to move real enterprise grade tier one workloads onto Nutanix and hyper-convergence infrastructure. You're seeing that tipping point now where it started out with VDI, it started out with some virtualized apps and the like. Now you're starting to see the big great apps moving over towards that. You'll see new certifications, whether it be vertical-based applications and healthcare, financial services and others, as well as look at SAPs, look at Oracle environments that are out there. We're really starting to see that move forward and so we're very excited about that development. Along with that, I think it is us continue to move up the stack and work with our customers on how they manage their workloads and their applications across these different environments. There's just a real dire need for more ease of management that's unified across these different increasingly complex environments. The risk, the opportunity is to run at far greater speed and get innovation out to market, get your apps in front of your customer base or your business base, but it still has to be a lot easier and I'd like to think that we're really good at making rather complex things easy. Yeah, I used to joke that enterprise simplicity was an oxymoron, right? Cloud has not gotten any simpler. Do you think, I mean, I know Nutanix is doing things, but you don't own all of the environment. You're partnering with a lot of the public clouds there. The feedback I get from users is, boy, if I compare today to a couple of years ago, it's, there's so many more choices. The paradox of choices stuff, I can't keep up with it. So I know Nutanix is making progress, but as an industry, what can we do better? Yeah, I think I used the term earlier, democratizing cloud, right? And I think that's a really important trend that's happening. I think increasingly it's not about a traditional legacy vendor owning anything, because I think there's a lot of choice that our customers want to have in terms of what decisions they make on cloud platform, what decisions they make in terms of where they run their different application environments and the like. And so, you know, part of that is giving them a far easier way to manage their infrastructure environment and a hybrid environment. We'll be rolling out in early customer access our XI cloud services. Doesn't mean we're going to own the public cloud. We already know there's several owners. XI, XI, not like I cloud, right? Yeah, it's XI as an XI. Nutanix, we use X to the infinity. And these are areas, right, where everything we do, it's about combining consumer grade simplicity, but then also choice of platform. And so, the only thing we want to own is, I'd say the mantle of being one of the easiest to use. And if we keep up with that mantra, I think we're going to be heading where the market's at. Maybe one other thing, earlier we were speaking to some of the leaders from the cloud business unit and we kind of drifted into a conversation about developers, right? So increasingly a lot of decisions are driven by developers in concert with people who run operations. How do you see that in the Nutanix customer base? Yeah, absolutely. We see more and more customers every day where either by accident or on purpose, the folks that are running the data center environments on-prem are starting to connect more, either by accident or on purpose with the DevOps communities that are within their own walls. Hopefully on purpose, not by accident. No, it happens sometimes on accident or in secret. We had a case where a very large retail customer of ours, they actually moved some of some early app development onto Nutanix platform and then they provided them with the really easy management portal. And all of a sudden they noticed everything was a lot easier to get visibility into and actually things were moving faster and pretty soon the rallying cry became, I want to get on the Nutanix, right? But whether it be that or whether it be how we can provide DevOps operations with an easier way like app catalogs, how can they get some automation behind what they do and what we do with our calm offering is really try to deliver more of those tools. And if you do that, there may be a little bit less of everyone sprawling out and working around and a little bit more of, hey, how can an IT organization help the DevOps practices do things in concert? Because I think there's still good reason to do so because sometimes you can see these environments get into trouble when things sprawl out too much. And then you get an areas like security concern that Al knows a lot about. Yeah, and the reason I brought that up is that a lot of the early cloud initiatives were developer first and infrastructure second. And it seems now that we're a little bit in reverse, like where the infrastructure side is finally caught up and that these two groups are actually moving more in concert as opposed to moving in different directions, in different speeds. Yeah, we had, you know, Stu was there, we had at our dotnext conference a few months back, we had our first hackathon where we brought together a lot of developers. It was like, bring a friend. So the folks that are maybe more traditional customers brought their DevOps counterparts in. And we had a fantastic hackathon where they were developing new apps on our platform and there's some fun stuff using Alexa that was doing voice-based commands to light up a VM, something as basic as that to a lot more advanced stuff that was about how do you provide more services out to Internet of Things type of devices out there. And so it's really early, but it's really a fun area and it's absolutely a trend that these app developers are really starting to drive a lot more. Any blockchain? You got any blockchain announcements to tell us about? No comments of today, but you never know. All right, well Ben, we're going to have to leave it there. Of course, the queue will be at dotnext in London, so maybe we'll ask you about blockchain again there. You never know, you can hit me with it again. Looking forward to seeing you there. All right, Ben, pleasure as always. Alan, thanks so much for joining you. I mean, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the queue.