 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman at the .NEXT Conference. Chris Wall is here, he's the founder and president of Wall Networks. We're just having a Nutanix love fest here. And it's, you know, for good reason, right? People are psyched, they're transforming their IT infrastructure and their organizations. You know, it fits in with, you know, dev ops, near and dear to your heart. So Chris, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Oh, thanks for inviting me on. Long time watcher, never been on before, so. Awesome, CUBE newbie, we love it. And appreciate you watching, thank you. So you've had a chance to, you know, we've been on theCUBE all day. We really haven't been able to attend any sessions. What's the vibe at the show? What are you hearing customers saying? I'll tell you, one of the coolest thing about the show thus far is I've been to three or maybe four sessions. It's been a long day. Every one of them involved customers in some way. Either I went to a return on investment ROI session with Steve Kaplan and he had a panel of customers, including financial data, talking, you know, hey, here's why we like the solution. Here's our pain points, you know, here's the problems that we're solving. So that's pretty cool. I mean, even in the keynote, they had customers up there, but every session there's customers talking about how they're using the platform, which is kind of rare. Yeah, Chris, isn't that what a user group's for? You go to a lot of Vmogs, you speak at the Vmogs, you've been to Vmworld, other shows, you know, what it's all about as a user. The first kickoff was two of the first customers. That was sort of a surprise curveball. That was surprising. I'll tell you, we do a lot of conferences and ServiceNow is one of the best and they make the point, and I would say this to anybody thinking about doing an event like this, 85% of the content, Frank Slutman talks about this all the time, 85% of the content comes from customers and that's where practitioners like yourself get value, isn't it? Yeah, it's absolutely, I would say it's invaluable. You have to have customers on. The challenge is it's tough, right? A lot of times you want to have customers on and you want to make sure that they're, you know, guided a little bit as far as content, what they're going to present to the audience. It's scary for those folks, but I think they've handled it well. For a number of reasons. One, they had, like I said, a panel of folks, so you've got a moderator kind of to help make sure that the questions coming from the audience make sense to the folks that are on the panel. We had another session talking about containers, so I think Kelsey Hightower was here talking about CoroS and Tectonic and things like that, as well as Benny from Nutanix was up there kind of counterpointing that, talking about how they're going to use the containers and it's just really cool when you get to hear people actually saying, yeah, we solved this particular problem with the platform and we're happy about it. You know, we're not up here, you know, you don't see any $100 bills stuffed in their coat pocket or anything. They seem to be genuinely passionate about the solution that they've acquired. So I asked, Stu and I talk about this all the time back in Marlboro, but what's really different about this so-called hyperconverse? What's really different about Nutanix? I mean, compare it to the sort of original converged infrastructure. You know, the VBlock, there's the HP stuff. Obviously Exadata's a little different animal. IBM kind of has some integrated systems and there are others in that app. What's the real difference between the sort of traditional converged infrastructure in Nutanix? I think it's a couple different things. First, you're able to wipe the slate clean from a lot of that legacy architecture, right? It's not that we built a stack of components and just plumbed them together, right? It's, you know, a lot of cases here for Nutanix is an example, it's Dell or Supermicro with all these software bits on top. It's all these commodity pieces with the software bits on top. So that's number one, it's kind of wiping the slate clear. Number two, it's all about the software, right? We're taking those commodity pieces and we're gluing together with software, which means we can iterate upon features and functionality really rapidly. You look at Erasure Coding was a new feature added by Nutanix and announced at the conference and they're showing now without any physical change you can get way more space efficiency out of your node. Even if you're an existing customer potentially you could just acquire this software piece, stick it into there using their one click upgrade process and you're using new feature functionality. That's not really something you can do easily with the legacy architecture, the converged architecture stacks. And I think the third piece of that is that it is managed as a thing. You look at a lot of the other converged infrastructure systems, they have a manager of managers. It's like this element manager soup and a lot of it kind of gives you data but doesn't allow you to control, hyperconverge, you really get that control, command and conquer kind of activity over the entire thing using one interface. So it's a abstraction but it's not abstraction of abstraction of abstraction. Yeah, it's not a mom, manager of managers. So Chris, I'm wondering, you've had a lot of experience with some of these solutions in the field. There's always kind of some of that promise. I mean, it's always, it's faster, better, cheaper, everything else like that. Hyperconvergence isn't necessarily the cheapest infrastructure out there. What's the real benefit you see with customers when they get it in? What's kind of the wow, what makes them so excited? I think there's, I think you could split that up into day one and day two, right? Day one, you look at VCE, for example, with the VBlock. It's three to four people across five days, a lot of knowledge transfer to get it operational. And then there's probably 40-ish days on the backend to get it configured and all that kind of stuff. So there's that versus hyperconverge, it's usually half a day, something like that. You know, by the end of the day, you're able to consume the product depending on how long it takes to get it in there. So there's that which I don't put a lot of value into that certainly is value but that's kind of table stakes for next gen. I feel like, I know when I first saw it, I'm thinking, wow, this is so simple. They've abstracted away all the lones, all these storage grouping, you know, all of the components to build this thing and make it usable is completely abstracted away. I just log into interface and say, hey, I want a data center and it builds one for me. And in the case of Nutanix, I can say I want an ESXi flavored data center and it'll inject the hypervisor onto the nodes. But there's a tremendous amount of value, just that's kind of the beginning of day two. And then when I want to do an upgrade, you know, matrix upgrades with something like a VBlock, that's a non-trivial amount of effort. You know, it takes days of time to go through kind of a list of here's the storage revisions, here's the firmware. They do test it for you, there's value there, but it's not trivial to get all that upgraded versus click a button and your entire system kind of upgrades non-invasively. That's pretty cool that they can do that. Adds a lot of value for the operations team. So I saw you attended a session today on negotiation strategies. I'm interested in that because it's timely, we're hearing a lot about the VTACs and other interesting moves by Nutanix and others. So what was that session all about? What was the contact? First I'll say that was one of the coolest sessions I've been to so far. It's not the traditional conference session. They brought in a professor from the Harvard School of Business to talk around negotiation tactics. And he actually had a really cool presentation where he talked about four different stories. And remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books where it's like, if you choose this, go to page nine? It was like that. He got you all the way up to the negotiation part of the story and asked the audience, you know, what would you do in this use case? And you could say, oh, I would, you know, this is what I'm feeling about that. Maybe they're trying to take over my company. And then it was a real life use case. So it's like, here's what happened. Here's kind of the benefits, the drawbacks. And it was eye-opening. The whole room actually was very quiet. It ran over a little bit into lunch. And if anyone's been to a conference, they know you don't run over lunch. The guy apologized and says, I'm running about 10 minutes over. If you want to leave, go ahead. I won't be offended, but I'm going to finish this last story. One guy left. And I felt like maybe that would have been a time to negotiate to get him back in his seat. But that didn't happen. So it was just really interesting to hear, you know, a veteran who's done, you know, he's talked about the NFL and various other, you know, sports and business negotiations to apply that to more of a general audience to help us negotiate strategically. Imagine that. So let's sort of bring that into IT. I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time with, you know, people in the Wikibon community and others helping, Oracle, right? Oracle licenses are always the biggest request that we used to get and still do with regard to, we need help. Increasingly, you're hearing, you know, customers say, oh, you know, VMware is hitting me. I got to pay up for different features. I got to pay in the VTACs, et cetera. Did you learn anything? Or do you have any advice as to how to apply that to customers that are frustrated in that regard? I think something you could use kind of as a strategy that came out of that session, plus just basic real-world experience dealing with those kind of things is, one of the kind of unifying pieces towards the end was don't think about it as a worst-case scenario. Don't say, all right, Oracle, for example, I'm going in and if I don't meet the licensing requirements, they're going to hit me for a $3 million, whatever that might be. You know, that's not the way to look at it. Look at it as, what do they also lose if I don't make this transaction happen? You know, look at it, look at the deal from the perspective of what the other person's going to either gain or lose if the transaction does or does not occur. And that can help you actually figure out the worst case. He gave an example where I was dealing with a very old issue, like 1912, making posters. They used a photograph that was copyrighted and it would have cost $3 million in 1912 to get the copyright license. He says the actual cost wasn't $3 million. It was figuring out, hey, Mr. Photographer, I'll give you the opportunity to use your photo in my presidential campaign if you pay me. And he actually got paid out of that transaction. So that's the way you can kind of flip a negative situation, you know, thinking about, all right, what's the loss or the gain here? The gain was the guy wanted the popularity. Maybe you can leverage some of that with your account rep or if you're a branded logo on their website, maybe there's some leverage there. Yeah, I mean, again, in the Oracle world, there's a lot of misconceptions. These companies that are really serious, sales-driven companies, which obviously Oracle is, I would say VMware is becoming a very much a sales-driven company. I presume you guys would agree with that. The conventional wisdom is always, well, wait till the end of the quarter to do the negotiations and in fact, that backfires on you because unless you are doing a $2 million deal, they don't even pay attention to you because they're on the heroin of big deals. So what you're saying is make it more of a, less of a zero-sum game, you know, more of a, I don't know, partnership's the right word. It's probably not the right word, but actually start early and try to figure out how to approach the negotiation. And the second thing we would tell people is treat it as a project. Because they're smarter than you are about, like, Oracle goes, we're all the skeletons are buried, they can audit your ass and so. And again, I don't know as much about VMware negotiations. You guys know more about that than I do, but you're hearing a lot of complaints from people at this event about the cost associated with VMware. And I don't know, you're hearing that a lot in the customer base or? Dancing around this? It's a tough question, yeah. It's a tough question. Yeah, I bring up a point though. I mean, Chris, we've been talking probably for the last year at least on kind of the VMware Nutanix dynamic. I mean, partner exchange last year, you know, there was a bit of a flare up, you know, Simon Sharwood who's here at the event, you know, publish, you know, basically Nutanix is going to take down VMware with their own hypervisor. It's a bit more nuanced than that. We've talked to a few customers here that, you know, I'm using VMware, you know, I'm happy with it, but of course if I can save money and I get the value, it makes sense. You know, what's your take on that whole discussion? You know, you know the space real well. There's definitely been a push on VMware's behalf and their partners, you know, the channel's behalf to get people into more suite based licenses and you know, everybody wants an ELA, no matter who the vendor is. That can certainly help or hinder you. I think that also goes, it couples pretty nicely with a statistic I heard. Maybe it's just a Twitter statistic, which, you know, who knows the validity, but I remember VMware saying something like 80% of their customers are just using pure hypervisor licensing, you know, just vCenter and VMware ESXi. And in that case, I'm not sure it makes a huge amount of sense to go all in with a full suite if you're going to use such a narrow piece of the pie. I think it's worth investing in, you know, kind of doing an investigation with your company to see how much of the portfolio do you want to use? Make sure to check in with your channel partners that are your trusted advisor to figure out what pieces make sense to start consuming and wrap that into a suite if it makes sense, because if you're using, you know, five or six of the 10 products in a suite, you wrap that into a suite pricing model, it can make a lot more sense. It's certainly a lot cheaper than an Alucard model. So what do you make of, so Nutanix decided we don't want to be an OEM of VMware. We don't want to, and we had DRR's on this one, he said like, we didn't want to compete with our, with our partners. I'm sure that's true, but the other thing is, you need to say this, is it's a crap business, reselling VMware licenses. I mean, HP has done it, IBM has done it, they used to claim A were the biggest reseller, you know, seven years on, they're like, so what? You know, open stack, finally, the Hail Mary. And so, so that's, I think smart on Nutanix's position, they're saying, look, we don't want to be in that business. What do you make of that? You're not really, you're not going to make it rich selling hypervisor licensing. I mean, the margins on that are razor thin and you look at the channel, you know, they're not, nobody's making money on that anymore unless you're doing an enterprise agreement, right? So you're typically, you're typically trying to couple it with product sale, professional services, things like that. Makes total sense to me that they're not interested from a margin perspective to look at reselling the hypervisor. I think the support aspect, I get kind of the nature of the beast, right? There are certain agreements that have to be upheld when you work with these partners. At the same time, a part of me looks at the ecosystem that Nutanix has built. They got an MPS score of 90. They've got over a dozen certified design experts that came from the VMware program. I don't know how many hundreds of support folks. It feels like allowing them to take first call on their own platform in a lot of cases is not a disservice unless we were hearing otherwise from the customers. So at the end of the day, that's who ultimately votes on, is this a good thing or not? I totally agree. And I mean, that's, you know, you see, you know, Chuck Hollis blog calls out Nutanix basically saying, you're not allowed, essentially, to support. You know, what do you mean? That was kind of, you know, but essentially the agenda there is we want to sell Vivo Rail and we want to sell, you know, Vsans and that's competitive. So maybe that's a, a, a fud factor that makes the, that makes the client say, well, wait a minute, hmm, you know, maybe that's too risky. So those are kind of interesting. NPS score, it's, it's easier to get an NPS score score when you're a one product company. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll see. That's good. That's an NPS score of 90, 90, 92, whatever they are. That's, that's good. Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, we talked about the customer angle. What about the channel? I mean, channel is kind of stuck in a little bit middle, you know, pulled by VMware, pulled by Nutanix, you know, what, what do you hear in general? Well, any product that doesn't have a lot of professional service with it is just a tough for a traditional bar, even some of the more kind of hybrid type bars. You know, and you look at other examples like Tintry is another great example of a product in kind of that next generation phase where it deploys really simply. There's not a lot of professional service you can do with it. Veeam is another example where you have to be creative with, am I going to add to workflow creation with something like virilize automation? Am I helping to build a private cloud? But just reselling the product directly isn't really an end game thing. You're not going to be able to feed your engineers off that kind of thing. So that's kind of where my headspace is on it. Yeah. So I'm curious, I've been poking at, you look at all the announcements that they made this week here at the conference, Nutanix. And, you know, Acropolis gets a lot of, you know, attention, you know, a whole lot of other things. I mean, the, you know, SMB file stuff, pieces there. Did you see anything there that helps the channel make more money? A couple of different things potentially. So I don't think the whole world's going to immediately just jump onto a KVM based hypervisor, you know, VMware's got a huge, entrenched customer base for a reason. And it's good. Yeah, it's a good product. What really kind of tickled my interest there was, number one, they brought Microsoft up on stage and kind of de-emphasized all the VMware components in their stack. They made it go gray, everything else was bright green. It's like, all right, I get the signal there. I understand where we're going with that. And there's definitely a lot of integration points hinted to, or at least road mapped in that keynote, saying we're going to offer some ability to go to public cloud with Amazon, with Azure. You know, we're going to allow you to run the app kind of anywhere. We're going to go for containers. And you'll look at that kind of portfolio. A lot of that doesn't include VMware. You know, a lot of that includes a lots of choice. So I think that's going to put a lot of the options back into the customer's court. We're kind of giving the ball back whether or not they choose to go down that road. I think it's a little too early to tell, but it's really great to see a company that makes a hyper-converged infrastructure stack, saying we want to get rid of silos at the cloud and hypervisor layer, not just the storage networking compute layer. I think that's pretty aggressive, but I agree with it. Yeah, I mean, question I have, in general, when I look at VMware is, how sticky are they with any application? Because most applications on either Windows, in which case, Nutanix, who's, as you said, here with Microsoft or Microsoft themselves, or, you know, if some Linux or new environment, Linux still has a lot of, VMware still has a lot of work to do on the developer side to get those people involved. So, you know, is VMware in danger of having the market move past them? So I think the danger is this. You know, a lot of customers bring up the licensing required for the guest operating system, potentially the container host. If I can seamlessly move between Hyper-V and KVM, and I'm already paying all that Windows licensing at the data center level that entitles me to Hyper-V, and there's not really any kind of huge differentiator, if the hypervisor does become the BIOS of the data center, that's the danger to me, because then I'm going to potentially just say, all right, I build this blob of data center on Hyper-V and KVM, I maybe leave VMware out of the table, or off the table, and I'm just kind of double dipping into my licensing. Maybe I've got a Red Hat agreement and a Microsoft agreement, and that covers me at a hypervisor and a workload perspective. And I kind of like the vision, and I'm like you to poke at it for us, is it's not just multi-hypervisor, but if I can also pull in public cloud, so the Nutanix vision of the A block is AWS or Azure, or even Google or something else fit into that mix. I have seamless usage of a lot of resources, and I think VMware probably has to have a play there, or you're missing a huge part of the market, but what's your take? Well, I would say, look at VCloud Air as an example, that's kind of their go-to-market strategy around public cloud. It does offer some kind of that legacy kind of look and feel to stretch my virtual data center out to the cloud, but from a services perspective, it's still pretty light. It doesn't offer a whole lot of things, images, et cetera, when compared to Amazon Marketplace. You look at that, or the Azure integration, and the services provided by Azure. So there definitely, I mean, there's no question that they're behind in that perspective. If I can now couple that same kind of experience out to public cloud and use those for, like they showed the slot or the radio dial showing 25% of workloads potentially want to be dynamic and elastic, if I can make that as easy as the rest of the data center, I mean, that's a pretty huge threat. Because in my opinion, that 25% number is going to continue to keep wrapping around. You know, the legacy is obviously going to tail off over time, the more containerized, service-focused, you know, service-oriented architecture is going to be further embraced by data centers. So that would be the scary part to me. Wow, VMware's strategy at the highest level has to be to stay ahead. So in the areas where they're behind, they better catch up and surpass. They're clearly behind in public cloud. I mean, we've seen that. We haven't talked about DevOps, your wheelhouse. So what's the connection between Nutanix and DevOps, or is it OpsDev? Well, I'm more on the Ops side, but we're just putting a new label on kind of an old concept. The way that I feel that this particular kind of component in the data center that converged, hyper-converged infrastructure can play really nicely is everything's accessible by API. It's all controllable by the API. It's very easily scripted and automated. And that's a real challenge today. You look at the folks using Ansible as an example to do all these network piece automations. You know, they're using Chef and Pub and all these other components. And they're having to use NetCon for some of their, you know, push Python code to a switch as an example. If I could treat my data center just like an API-driven entity, like the whole thing as an endpoint, pull in metadata, push metadata in, whatever it may be. I think that offers the ability to really automate out a lot of our day-to-day infrastructure components. So that gets me kind of giddy in the morning. It gives me the excited DevOps shakes. That's awesome. All right, Chris, we'll have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you. It was awesome, thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back to wrap up day one of .next. NextConf here at Miami. The Nutanix inaugural user conference. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back.