 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Sherry Lautenbach who's the SVP of America Sales with Nutanix and Inder Sidhu who's the EVP of Global Customer Success also with Nutanix. Sherry and Inder, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so Sherry, first of all, you were up on stage this morning celebrating customers. We actually had the chance yesterday to interview one of the nominees there and talked about what that meant to them and it was really talked about, you know, it's validation where, you know, we're trying something. We think we kind of, you know, went out beyond what other people are doing and getting that validation back was just real, they were really excited just to be nominated. So, you know, take us inside. Yeah, so, well, first of all, we had hundreds of nominations, so it was super hard to choose and break it down to the finalists and then, of course, the winners. But for us, it was about innovation, about cloud trailblazers, you know, dev ops, you know, lots of different types of awards this year and recognizing things that customers are doing to innovate with Nutanix. The best award we did have was Art.heart Give Back Award and that, you know, it says a lot about our company that we focus on what companies are doing to better the communities they live in and the world in general, so. Yeah, and JetBlue's the winner there. Absolutely. How they say makes me even happier to talk about, you know, I've got status with JetBlue because I fly to a lot of shows. Yeah, right, I can imagine, though. They've been a great partner of ours, a great spokesperson and they've really leveraged our technology to innovate with their company, so it's been, it was a great morning. All right, Inder, we've watched Nutanix since the early days. Discussion about NPS scores and when you can't, when you come to an event like this, you can't help but feel the passion of the customers over 5,500 people here. Talk to us about what your role is, your engagement with customers, that whole customer success and what that means. Yeah, customer success, in my mind, too, is probably the single most important thing that we do at Nutanix. And the reason is because customers drive everything that the company does. It drives our employee behavior, it drives our partner behavior, it drives our product roadmaps. We're an outside in company, fundamentally, and therefore driving the customer success holistically, not just in terms of support after they might have an issue, but holistically end-to-end over the entire life cycle is very, very important for us. So we're creating an organization and investment and reporting all the way into the CEO to drive exactly that, and we're very excited about that. Right, and I call it customer obsession. So I've been at Nutanix six months. The first day I showed up to headquarters, they gave me my laptop, and then they brought me up to the customer support area and said, this is why we're so successful because we are maniacally focused on ensuring our customers are being delivered value every day and with a focus on our NPS score daily. So for me, that was super impressive and we don't let up on it. Yeah, Sherry, and I love some of the pieces. You were talking about innovation and talking about developers. We've been talking to a lot of customers about their digital transformation. It's not just, oh, okay, I'm replatforming. It's more than that, talking about what one of the customers said, it's business as IT. Right, absolutely. So digital transformation is clearly the buzzword, but it is all about what are companies doing to transform their businesses to become digital. And Dirich always says to be in that digital transformation journey is all about what you do to transform not only your IT operations, but the business. And the business drives what digital transformation does. Absolutely, and it's not just creating things online or creating a presence, but it's actually innovating yourself to differentiate yourself from your competition. We've seen that time and time again on what Amazon did to bookstores or what Netflix did to Blockbuster. And those types of things are the innovation that drives the change. So, and speaking of innovation, Nutanix digitally transformed themselves into a software company. You guys made a lot of announcements, a lot of new products in the pipeline, a lot of new features available, GA as of the show. Nutanix has become a bigger company, valuation over $9 billion as you get bigger. It's hard to keep that NPS score over 90. Where's the focus and how do you do it as Nutanix grows? You know, one of the things I think as we become a big company in terms of size and scale, in terms of our heart and in terms of our spirit, we're very much a small company. I go tell customers there is going to be times when we'll screw up, but you'll never find any company that's going to work harder than us to drive your success. And that's where the intent is, that's where the focus is. We're going to do whatever it takes from a holistic end-to-end customer perspective. We're assigning customer success managers to some of our largest customers so we can proactively engage with them, especially along three dimensions. We're not like a lot of other technology companies where, you know, you try to just sell them technology. We are around three things. We want to make sure that our customers can be organizationally proficient. We want to make sure that they're operationally efficient and we want to make sure that they're financially accountable. All three of those dimensions have to do with stuff that's important to them. As we make them successful along those dimensions, automatically the technology gets to, starts to get adopted and they start seeing some benefits. So, Sherry, let's talk about that customer success manager. What are they empowered to do? Like, if there's a problem, how do they make it right? Well, that's a great question. They're empowered to do whatever it takes on behalf of the customer to ensure that, one, they're deploying our technology well and they're finding great value in it. It's interesting, I've spoken to many customers at this conference and so many of them have said, using Nutanix has changed my career, my career trajectory and what I, the business value I provide, the organization, not just from an IT standpoint, but on the business side. And so, for me, there's no greater compliment when our customers, they're cheering for us, they're rooting for us and we're helping to transform what they do every day. So, the customer success manager is going to be just an overlap in terms of ensuring and driving that success as we get deeper and deeper into these customers. And what we're going to do is we're going to start out with customer success managers more at the top of the pyramid, some of the largest accounts. But remember, we still have hundreds and hundreds of account team members from Sherry's team and others, SCs, all of whom provide an even greater leverage and then extending all the way through our partners. So, we have a high-touch model at the top, it's CSM, we have a medium-touch model with SCs and account teams and inside sales reps and partners in the middle and at the bottom of the pyramid, we've got a tech-touch model where we're going to actually leverage our technology, the self-service portals and so on, with emails and webinars and training and material that can actually drive their end-to-end success, very focused on that. Sherry, I wonder if you can dig in some of the organizational pieces that Inder was talking about. From your customers, as you move up the food chain with the products, what are you hearing from your various constituencies inside of companies? Inside of our customers? Inside of the customers, yes. Right, so we cover, in terms of an organizational size, we cover all different types of customers in various ways. We have dedicated account people to our largest accounts alongside with SCs, of course. We leverage our partners, though, in our channel and everything we do, so they're considered an extension of our sales force, which I think is truly valuable and really important that we ensure that they drive success with our customers. Yeah, anything special you're hearing when you get up to the C-suite, pain points that they're hearing more than you heard down in the architect or admin standpoint? Yeah, no, they're looking for more of helping to rationalize cloud. How do I get to cloud? What's the right balance in terms of hybrid, on-prem, off-prem, and really understanding the business value and drivers around it, not just cost efficiency. It's about transforming different areas of their business and many of the C-suite customers I speak to really are approaching it in many different ways depending on what is the key payment point and business problem they're trying to solve. Yeah, the two things I'd say to add to Sherry's answer there is that what we see is customers wanting to engage more architecturally rather than an individual point product through a consultative process that is more around business outcomes. So it's not something necessarily new, but it's a little bit new for Nutanix because we've historically engaged at the technology level and now you're finding more. Off the Fortune 50, we have 33. Off the Fortune 100, we have 66. So we're actually starting to get to the really large customers in a big way. They want a deeper architectural all-in engagement and as our portfolio starts to expand from just HCI to Flow and Beam and XI and all of those, they're saying gosh, I mean I just literally ran into a CIO in the elevator coming down this morning and he said gosh, we were thinking about doing NSX but now that I came here and I heard about Flow and I heard about XI, I think I'm going to go all in with you guys. I'm going to put that thing on ice and really work with you guys on this. Literally unsolicited in the elevator this morning. That's impressive. So as we, on along the lines of growth, you guys have a huge user community, 70,000 participants and this morning, Dr. Brennan, I'm sorry, Dr. Brenne Brown talked about having difficult conversations around diversity. What I first give you guys kudos, this is from a optics perspective, been one of the most diverse technology conferences I've attended from the entertainment to the on-stage presence, to the keynote speakers, awesome job. As you guys are working towards having a more diverse user set, how are you helping your user community be successful along their careers from a diversity perspective and whereas a career development perspective? Great question and yes, I'm super proud of the diversity things we're doing in the company. Just yesterday I hosted a women's IT luncheon, so we celebrated the women around Nutanix, so that was all about building a network of all of our customers, email and mail, they were included too in this luncheon and we had over 130 people spent time, I said let's exchange business cards, let's talk about some of the challenges you face. We had one of our board members, Sue Bostrom, shared some very personal stories about challenges she's faced and opportunities to help advance her career, gave a great perspective on that. We also had the CEO of Flywheel, she talked about failing fast and pivoting and that to me was just great little lessons in tidbits that we can provide our customers to say let's empower you to be even better and to build your network even more effectively. And if I can add to that, I think what we're always looking for is a diversity of ideas and those diversity of ideas is not just a nice to have, it's a must have because it actually drives positive business outcomes from us when we start to represent what our community of users and what a community of customers is and that diversity of ideas comes from people who've had a diversity of backgrounds. Across a wide range of dimensions of diversity and that's what we're really looking for. We're not necessarily solving for outcomes, we want to solve for opportunity and make sure that everybody has that equal opportunity to engage and participate and the more we do that, the richer we get, the more powerful we get, the more alive we become. I think we're diverse. Right, and you think about that, our traditional influencer was in the data center side but we've found now in terms of diversity of our portfolio, the developer is going to be just as important as of an influencer for Nutanix. So we're looking at it from not only just our customers and who but what they do. Inder, I was wondering if you could give some color also on the vertical side of things. We know you started early with very much in the public sector space, had a lot of strength there to speak to how else you're growing in the vertical space. Yeah, one of the things we're doing is as we get into bigger and larger customers, as you know we have 9,000 customers, adding 1,000 every quarter, we have about 642 after global 2,000 customers and so as we get into those, those customers want us to be able to talk to them in their language around their issues. So I'll give you a great example. You know, recently we hired a guy, his name is Don Mims, out of Baylor-Scotten-White as a customer success manager. Here's a guy who's done, everything the Nutanix products implemented them all through Baylor-Scotten-White, 7,000 beds, 48 hospitals and here's the guy who's implemented Nutanix, he's implemented AHV, he's implemented Epic. I've got 40 other customers in the U.S. alone who want to implement Epic and AHV in the healthcare sector among the provider community and we're going to go towards those customers with that kind of verticalized expertise. Same thing around financial services, same thing around retail. I mean, when you look at retail, Walmart, Home Depot, tractor supply company, Nordstrom, Target, you know, Best Buy, Coals, we've got a wide range of customers who give us insight into their operations and when we engage with them, when you're talking to a retailer, you're talking about dollars per square foot, you're talking about same store sales, you're talking about a flexible workforce and you translate that into IT, which translates into a hybrid, public-private flexible infrastructure. So as we have these conversations, they're very engaging and we are starting to verticalize, if you will, in terms of our overlay expertise. Salesforce, of course, is going to be geographic first because of the proximity that's required, but we're going to have overlay both in the services and in the sales organization that's going to be very vertical as well. And we have found that there are certain geographies and areas that we can verticalize in the field. So, for example, Tennessee or in California, we can build healthcare verticals, which has been very effective because customers want us to talk in their language, understand what critical business applications they can leverage with Nutanix. So we're trying to mirror, as best we can, the vertical kind of point of view in the field. Public sector, of course, is the first vertical that gets carved out. For many companies, service providers are the second. We've already got public sector carved out. And one of the three great gurus, Kudos to Sherry and her team, you were proactive Sherry with Brad Rhodes and kind of carving out healthcare as a dedicated sales region in the West where people have nowhere to hide this. You live and die by the healthcare success, customer success. Well, and also the familiarity on the use cases, right? A lot of the use cases are repeatable, so it just makes a lot of sense for us to bring teams together that can go to market that way. So, let's talk about the speed of Nutanix. I love the story, the impromptu meeting, CIO in the elevator. Hey, you guys are wowing me with the technologies in ways I never thought of. Let's talk about the other end of it. Where are customers pushing you saying, you know what, you guys need to move faster. You have one customer that's on NSX, you have a bunch that are looking way past that. Right. Now that's a great question. And the great thing about Nutanix is we really don't say no a lot. I mean, we've got to be very thoughtful in what we sign up for. But we will innovate and collaborate with customers in every instance. So, what is it that you need? You need support on a platform. We'll give you the right timeframe to do it. But yeah, we're going to do what we can to deliver on that. So, there is a lot that's coming at us from a speed standpoint with our customers and the demands that they have. But I think that's a testament to the adoption and the delight that they have of using Nutanix and wanting to expand that in their enterprise. And I think to some extent, Keith, I think your question is more about where are we perhaps falling short a little bit? And I'll tell you one area where perhaps we could do better, which is for support of a wider array of platforms. So for example, when we go to Asia-Pacific, a lot of our customers are telling us, gosh, you got support for Dell or Lenovo or IBM, et cetera. But what about other platforms that are local Hitachi or Fujitsu or Insta or Huawei, et cetera. So we're going to get very disciplined and structured around it. We don't want to over commit and let anybody down because extending support to multiple platforms is not trivial. But we want to make sure that when we commit, we say what we'll do and we do what we say. And that's a guarantee that we'd like to provide to our customers. Inertiary, I want to give you both an opportunity, just final takeaways, you want your customers to know about Nutanix as they leave the show this year. Well, we'd love for more customers to come on board. One thing I've seen with our customers that are here is that they love our technology, they're delighted. We've helped change jobs and careers with many of our customers. And for me, that's a huge privilege. I'd just say that customer success is the single most important thing for us, for our customers. We might make a mistake every once in a while, but you will never find anybody who works harder on your behalf. We've got the energy, we've got the fire in the belly, we got the agility and we're going to do everything that it takes to make you successful no matter what, period and the story. So we're all in, we hope you can be all in with us as well. All right. Inder and Sherry, obviously the passion is here from you, from your customers and the team. Thanks so much for joining us today for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here coming from Nutanix.NEXT, New Orleans 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.