 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswamy, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming. Bye for the show. Great to be here, John. We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the SuperCloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now, there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations. Developers are doing great, but now something magical is happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that. That's called SuperCloud. Indeed. How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great, ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term SuperCloud. We've been calling it hybrid multi-cloud, essentially. But the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do these sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers, and some of these applications, increasingly, are going to run in edges. And now, what most companies struggle with is, every cloud is different. Their on-premise is different. Their edge is different. And they don't have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations, but you need to think about cloud as an operating model. And what the SuperCloud or hypermulti-cloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model, one way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's vantage point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency. And the IT teams can help support that easily. You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformations, certainly from customers. They were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx, now it's covered by the cloud. So it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time, the vendors are saying, hey, you know, buy our stuff. And so you have the change over how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model. Where's the gap? Because nobody wants complexity. And, you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally, complexity has been a friend for vendors. But the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff. You need very specialized teams. And guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people process technology. There's plenty of technology out there. But right now there's a big scarcity of people. And I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, you know, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in who are, you know, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer-like experience with their experience with software and applications. And they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. You know, just so you mentioned that, when the hyperconverge, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher-level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration. That's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration. But that's a trade-off. So we're seeing a new trend in the SuperCloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture where there's trade-offs. How do you see some of these key trade-offs? I know you're talking to a lot of your customers. They're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day-zero mentality. What are some of those key trade-offs and architectural decision points? So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of sorts, and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud-operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different. Their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solve this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now, this notion of super cloud is what, it's simply about converging different clouds and different data. Kind of the same thing. And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together, rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting what the super cloud was. You get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premises, which is basically cloud operations. Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud, it's an operating model. It's the way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. Okay, so when I hear about substrates and abstraction layers, I think two things. Innovation, because you extract away complexity. Then I also think from the customer's perspective, maybe lock-in. Yes. Whoa, promises, promises, lock-in is a fear. And ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. Whatever runs the software, go faster. But ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So what's that trade-off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic and how to get around it. And I think that's been some of the fundamental trends of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. And our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack. You don't want to lock-in to your point. So, you know, at the very bottom, hardware, choice of hardware, yeah. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with, or public cloud, bare metal. When you look at Hypervisor, lots of choices, right? You've got VMware. You've got our own AHP, which is KVM-based open-source Hypervisor. No lock-in there. Provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributed storage stack, which we provide. And then, of course, lay us about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go to the full stack, or how much they want to go piecemeal it. And there's a trade-off there. The more they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity. And that, I think, is the trade-off that each customer has to weigh. Okay, you guys have been transforming, for many, many years, we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, to software, I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you've made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? The public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What do you guys do, and what specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell any more hardware, they're not on our books anymore, we're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud platform, on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission-critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the super cloud, I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes, that's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS, and we're extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge, and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data. Blocks, files, objects are all part of the platform, and we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations. And we deliver the cloud-operating model. So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore? We don't sell hardware anymore, we work with a whole range of hardware partners, HPE, Dell, Supermicro, Neiman, Lenovo, and... Okay, so if I'm like a telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? So you buy the software from us, and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. Okay, so you sell on the server? Yeah, we sell on the server. Yeah, okay. So it's good, so no hardware, no software, good transfer, how's that going, good? It's going very well, because we made two transformations. One is, of course, we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're a 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions, they have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long-term lock-in here. We're happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer, it's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCR, hyperconvergent infrastructure. They see us as a leader there, and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workloads, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on that journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever they may be, including the most mission-critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we're on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on, modernizing the infrastructure, which we help, and then creating a cloud operating model and making that available everywhere. Yeah. And I think that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to SuperCloud, which I want to get your thoughts on, because AWS, for example, spent all that capex, they're called the hyperscaler. Yes, they got H in there, there's an after-scale in there. And now you can leverage that capex by bringing Nutanix in. You're a hyperscale-like solution on premise and edge. So you take advantage of both, absolute success and a trajectory of cloud. So your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe? Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples of how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSB. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem. But what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized they could just take the exact same platform, software that they were running on our platform and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. That's agile. That's agile. That's agile. And a great business outcome. Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. Months, first of all, I mean, just think about it. They have to open a data center, which probably takes them. They have to buy the hardware, which you know with supply chain, supply chain. God knows how long that takes. Oh God, yeah. So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. And so just one example of a very compelling value proposition. So you feel good about where you guys are right now at relative to these big waves coming? Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and... What are the biggest ones that you see? Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware. And great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect and for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? Yes, I mean, a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. A lot of VMware alumni at New Jacks Town. Yes, they're certainly... We have our share of VMware alumni. We also have our share of alumni from other companies. They call the V Mafia, by the way. I don't know what the V Mafia, but... But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen. And therefore they are looking at potentially, what are the other alternatives? And we're very much front and center in that discussions. Well, Dave Vellante and I and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations you guys are doing there. How would you describe the super cloud concept to a customer when they say, hey, what's this super cloud? It's becoming a thing. How would you describe what it is and the benefits? Yeah, I think the first thing is to tell them what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is they have applications everywhere, they have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're an Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prem, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably a fourth. And it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a super cloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute, storage, network needs, one way of handling your security policies and security constructs. And giving you that, also it's a dramatic simplification on the one side. And it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want, completely free. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SaaS and IaaS solves a lot of problems, highly integrated. That takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. Exactly. That's a super cool environment. Any environment, wherever, right? It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. And that's essentially the goodness of cloud going everywhere. But that extension is what you call a super cloud. Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable and you've got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge, you've got the IoT edge and just the edge in general. On premise, I think it's hybrid. It's a steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course. Things cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic. A lot of shifting, OT, IT. That's actually transformed. Yes, absolutely. Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying industrial robots now. Spaces around the corner. A lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things. So the edge is exploding. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand. But you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges. Because a lot of these are crunching applications that require and generate a lot of data. Crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you to have compute locally. And there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is- The edge is a data center now. Exactly, think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely- Self-healing, all those good stuff. Exactly, it has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradable and lifecycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud. And you're going to actually, essentially, what you need is a cloud-managed edge. Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning, there'll be more. Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who call that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical, architectural knowledge to the table on SuperCloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. Okay, SuperCloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to be watching. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching.