 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment. We have Michele Illous, she's the art director for Nutanix, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me. And we have Satish Ramachandran, global head of design at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, you're welcome. So it's always so much fun to talk to really creative people, particularly in this technology world. I want to start the conversation by asking Michele first, where you go for inspiration and who do you talk to, what do you read, what kinds of things do you look at to inspire you to then bring them back to your job here at Nutanix? So I strongly believe that inspiration come from everywhere. No matter where you go, is it architecture, you go to the supermarket and you look at packaging or you read a book and you think about images or even just social media. And there is so much variety of different opinion and different cultures to get inspired from. Like even from this conference, we took inspiration from Copenhagen, the city, and from Swiss design or from California and the vibe and the mid-century, I put like, not infrastructure, but like architecture. We created this really fun wall, the Sabrina Best Day ever. And I was actually reading a book with my kids, the Diary of the Wimpy Kid. And I was like, okay, you know what? We can make something really fun out of it. We can take like a page from a diary and create Sabrina Best Day. Something like that. So it's truly everywhere. It's truly everywhere. How about you, Satish? Well, it's two parts, actually. I think one is the inspiration when it comes to the aesthetics of design. So to a large degree, I'm a huge fan of minimalism, everything from Japanese paintings, for example, where with two or three strokes, you have a stark on the water. The Bauhaus movement, you know, clean, elegant lines, very minimal to the point. And even the Scandinavian architecture, for example, is quite minimalistic and very clean. So that is one angle on what we strive to do in terms of getting to minimal, clean, simple. But then the other portion of inspiration is actually comes from empathy. Because, you know, I care deeply about the human condition, even pre-Newtonics, you know, sort of teenage angst that never left me, right? And so in a sense, there's a lot of empathy to what people are going through in terms of technology, how they're using it, how can we make their lives easier, how can we bring about some joys in their life. And to a large degree, the sector we work in, you know, IT, has been sort of underserved design-wise for many years. And so there's a lot of inspiration that comes in the form of motivation in order to do something for people there. Well, yeah, Satish, I'm wondering, can help connect the dots with us? I think of minimalism and obviously ties to the simplicity of Nutanix. And remember in the early days talking to Nutanix, to make something truly simple from a technology standpoint, usually has a lot of work. And we've been talking to the executive team about, you know, in this multi-cloud, highly dispersed era, it's even harder today. So how do some of those core design principles make their way into Nutanix's world? You want me to talk about the process, right? So I think the process is quite straightforward. I mean, you start with understanding the space, understanding the experience that exists in the space. You don't start with the feature or the product. That's the first thing. You start with the people. So you start with a very human-centric manner on, okay, what are they trying to do? What are they trying to achieve? And how do you get them in the simplest possible manner to do that? So we have this thing that we use called intentional design, which is one of our design principles, wherein how do you get someone who has an intention to fulfill their intention with the least amount of effort? And the effort in the middle is what we label as friction constantly. So we talk about trying to become frictionless and so on. So the process for that is you start with the person, what they're trying to get done, and from there you actually work all the muscles in the organization. So design, basically at that point, takes on the role of a facilitator by bringing in engineering, product management, design itself together, and all in service of the user to create an experience. So it starts with formulating the requirements together with engineering and product management, et cetera, et cetera, then converging on these things by creating prototypes, then testing these things with users and so on, and then figuring out really what is essential, what can be thrown out, and how to keep it really simple. And that's how we build product, basically. So as you said, it starts with this point of empathy and then it is this collaborative process between the engineers and the artisan design team. How would you say that design is more part of the Nutanix philosophy? Just rather than the simple, simple, easy, elegant products itself, but the entire company, how would you say it's built into the philosophy, Mikhail? I actually think this is why Nutanix is so unique in our space, because we don't just look at the technology, we look at it a whole package, at the design and the technology, the left brain and the right brain together. And it comes from our leadership because Dheeraj is a great advocate for design. He's really believing in the importance of it, not just as a pretty rap on something, but as something that is meaningful and really able to provide a full experience for our customers. Yeah, Mikhail, maybe I'd love to get you both of your commentary. There's a new advertising campaign that was launched, the video was in the keynote yesterday. It's all together now. It is very colorful and it is very diverse. And at the same time, even, I'm a technology guy, I will often roll my eyes when I see certain advertising but to articulate to the world, it's like, okay, how does my database and multi-cloud and all these things play together? Well, we anthropomorphized those technology pieces into people and you've got photos that you can do there. So bring us inside a little bit as to how that, you help the messaging some pretty complex pieces underneath. Yes, we're very excited about this campaign. I have to tell you, we worked very hard to conceptualize it and bring it out to the world and we were very excited to be able to share it here at Dot Next. The thinking behind it was, you know, IT world is complex and here in Nutanix, we really try to offer a simple way to remove this complexity. So what is a better way than just take those IT concept and business and application matters and personalize them and make them fun and when you think about public cloud, what do you mean? What does it mean to you? How do you envision it? When you think about a database, do you think about this strong man that carry into a cylinder and you make the campaign more, you humanize it. You make it accessible to people and you make it fun and this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to delight our customer. We're trying to empower them to be able to do their business in a better way and that was our goals. Provide simplicity, choice and delight. And as you said, it's anthropomorphizing of this. If the database were a person, what would that database person look like? If the cloud were human, exactly. And I think it just make it fun and you make it unique and you create something that is different in our scene and I think that's what we're trying to do. How do you work together with the engineers? I mean, I know you said you gather in a room and you are thinking about the end user. How does the customer experience this? But how do artists and engineers communicate? I mean, is that ever a challenge or? Not really. No. No, actually, it's a three-legged stool. Basically, if you put marketing in there as well for the awareness piece, which precludes anything that the customer uses, it actually becomes a four-legged stool. But in terms of building product, it's a three-legged stool which is product management and they're trying to figure out what is the product market fit and that's what they bring to the table. The engineers come in and as we are dreaming up stuff, they are thinking, is this stuff buildable or not? These guys dreaming way too much, right? And so it is a conversation. So, and I think that's the crucible in which the best creativity actually comes out. It's not design in isolation, where design dreams up something and the rest of the folks build it. It really isn't that. So, we are actually, in a sense, the way I see it, we are the glue and we form the crucible for the conversation and in that, good things come out, basically, yeah. So, we're here, we are in Denmark which is design savvy, fashion forward, food obsessed. In Huga. In Huga, yes. Cultivating that sense of well-being and comfort and coziness. What kinds of things are you going to take with you from this conference itself? What are you seeing? What's interesting to you and how are you going to bring that back to Nutanix? Honestly, for me, I think it's just the warmth of the people and the community in here. They were so abrasive and kind and we got a chance to work with a lot of people when we were building this conference and to me, it's all about the human connection. And I think this is something that I will definitely carry with me when we go back to Nutanix and we will try to think about our next.next conference and how we can bring some of that to that as well. Satish, anything on .next Copenhagen and you're from Berlin so you're already in Europe and get some different cultural inputs. I think there is still some stuff, I think around accessibility mainly for me. Like the hotel we are staying in, first thing I noticed was there's Braille on when you have to open the refrigerator, for example, or the closet door. And I mean, the first thought was like, they have already designed in the accessibility. And then I relate that back to product and I think how are we doing on accessibility? And of course, everything around you here is pretty inspiring in terms of architecture and so on and so forth. So that's a gimme really. And you see that a lot even in Germany so that it isn't as much new. But in terms of the conference, it's very heartening that we have come this far. I remember Miami many years ago, which is my first conference. We were like all of 600 people and now we are 4,500 here. So in a sense, it's very heartening and people seem to embrace the vision that we are putting forth around convergence of many, many things. How deeply technical are both of you? I understand. I understand the technology. I understand the struggle. I understand what we are trying to achieve as a company. It doesn't mean I can go and do a demo on stage. But I think it's important to understand the technology of the company that you work for in order to represent it truly and in order to convey the message that we are trying to tell. Because we are a storyteller. That's what we do. We take the message and the technology and we bring it out to our customers. So it's important. I'm a died-in-the-wool engineer. Yeah. So I was, I mean, my case is where I was an engineer for roughly two decades. You know, architect, running engineering teams, that kind of stuff. And then I stumbled upon design. So I have a very deep understanding of engineering and what it takes to build stuff. But I have another side of me, which is generally around empathy, experiences, you know, human interaction, human behavior, what makes people take, what frustrates them, those kinds of things. So for me, that way design has been a synthesis of many of my interests. And that's why I fell in love with it and have stuck around. One of the biggest issues in Silicon Valley and in the technology industry at large is the skills and the right people, the talent gap. How much of an issue is that for the design teams within these technology companies? Because you are looking for so many different skills, people who can grasp the technology, but then also have this more creative sparkiness to them too. How hard is it to find the right people? I think it's a little bit of a challenge, but I think we are very fortunate to have amazing teams that understand technology and design and the connection between them. So I know I feel very fortunate with the people I get to work with. They're very, they are amazing. Yeah. I mean, it was hard in the beginning when Nutanix was 150 people or something and the brand nobody knew. So then it was very hard to find the right people and to also simplify the vision and to sell it. I still remember spending with every new hire, I'd be the first guy they would talk to. And I spent two hours on a whiteboard, taking what is a technology problem and translating it into an experiential problem. And speaking to really, this is very hard to design for and that's where the challenge lies, right? But over a period of time, we have successfully built a brand, which is a Nutanix design brand. And we have done a ton of things that I'm actually very proud of, establishing relationships with universities, even on the social media, having a website, having a proper blog, various things where now we are recognized in the enterprise space as a place for designers to go and work. And there is a certain combination I've figured out which makes for a good designer in the space because if you take people with too little of a technology background, then the ramp up is very high. So if you typically you find somebody who's got done some amount of technology either in a prior company or in school, and there are people like that, there are plenty of them. And then they're moved on to design. And that seems to be the right mix because they understand, they empathize both on the technology side and also on the design side of things. And that makes for the right combination. So it's not too bad to find people. And I think technology can be taught, but I think passion and caring is that part of it is hard to find. The innate skill that you have. Exactly. Great. Well, Miguel and Satish, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, but a fun and enlightening conversation. Thank you so much. Lovely, it's great to be here. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next.