 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next. We are wrapping up a two day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We save the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer and Monica Kumar, SVP product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having us. So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Alba speaking next. Energy, great vibe, congratulations. You both said well deserved vacation after this. But I want you to Ben close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees come away with. Yeah, thanks to theCUBE for joining us here. It's been a long marathon right over the last two days and thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event. And for us, it really starts with getting even deeper and more connected with our customers, right? And so we do the great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the Corvid, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs? So it's training and certification and networking with their peers. And you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad hoc groups that just come together in a hallway and they sit down, I go over and I say, what are you guys up to? And we're like, well, this is like our HV mashup group and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices, tips. And so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what's at the heart of this show. One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90, which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event. You guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content-driven, content value with nice tracks, a lot of good compments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you, Ben and Monica, what's your highlights so far? You know, I'll take this one as a newbie. I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first dot next. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online, right? So I think it's still sizable but the beauty is that we are still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our CIS admins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees. We are like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for customers and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away when as I go back is what can we take as a feedback in how we can do things better and have you bring our products to market. And highlights for you? Yeah, for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. Pretty cool. And that was a lot of fun, right? And we had just gone through an hour and a half of great content, our new tags, mine announcement. That was great. We announced HV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then the cool thing about our shows, we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case, and I know with many people in the arena and I saw it in the meet and greet afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill, I had to contain myself because I'm a complete Star Wars geek at my core. And we had a great conversation and you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got early on and we talked about his career journey. So in a really fun way, it kind of connects with a lot of journeys we have with our professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on a new disruptive technology. Yeah, it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having the Star Wars and Mark here was really great because we knew the Democrats, we all love Star Wars. So nice connection to the tech audience, but your customers consistently say in the cube and off the cube in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's a rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy vendors. And so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing. It's to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. Yeah, you're right, it's rebellion that's spreading and growing. But as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right? And the outcomes we create for customers. But then when I see one of our early customers and when we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying and assessing a plane over the Grand Canyon and he had his iPhone. He was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah, there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's higher performance levels. You can go through all the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family. And that sounds kind of cheesy, but it's real. And you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think at marketing and communicating our technology advantage, but it's about more than that. Ma, how about your role? You had a stellar career, you now knew at Nutanix. You're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What are you going to be working on? You know, as with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer. So we are obsessed with making sure the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market, how we message it to connect to what problem they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company and the opportunity is, we know customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to modernize the infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There's a lot of complexity out there. So our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I'm going to undertake with Ben here is come up with the right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. You know, Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, cubes 10 years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up, but you're still a young company. Dira said, you know, billion dollar startup. That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goals? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically. Your content is on the mark at the conferences also digitally. You have this nice organic kind of discovery for your customers are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth's big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? Well, thank you. I agree with those things, but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about is the opportunity. So if you look at the past year and I talked about this at our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT spend tied to traditional 3-T or data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, 100 billion plus in annual spend. Hyperconvergence, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably about five billion, right? So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world has been modernized. And I'm not claiming 100%, but I'm claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of greenfield left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value as well as financial and operational value of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and it's something I know Dears and Sunil talk a lot about, we've hyperconverged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible. Much grander ambition, how do you hyperconverge clouds, right? How do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for app mobility and the like and take that to the next level? So to me there's still the core mission, we're just getting started. You know I asked Sunil that question, I said how do you convert, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment, we weren't on camera, I wish he had said it on theCUBE, we were off theCUBE before. He said well people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, and now they're going to bring that mojo to the enterprise on premises because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself but they can't get everything to the cloud. So they got to get modernized on premise as an operating model, not so much a, you know, just refresh. And you know to add to that, I mean if you think about the role of technology, right? It's the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives. And so I think the next big frontier is all around automation, right? So I think this whole move to cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks. I mean we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure. So you're going to see us really focus a lot more on how can we help IT automate a lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which actually could be easily done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software. Human beings can actually then focus on other more important things. Right, whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or the meaty tasks of our jobs. Exactly. So it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're going to enable with our software as we continue to go forward. I'd love you to comment on Iyanna Howard, Dr. Iyanna Howard's keynote this morning where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans and how that's really the collaborative AI. And that's really where the future is heading. How are you, how do you think about that? And how do you message that? And how do you approach that within Nutanix? Yeah, I totally agree. It's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is going to be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Whether, like I said, whether it's in our personal lives or work life. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life where I can see how machines or softwares change the things that I used to do before, which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples. I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand. And now we have, you know, when I moved to the US, we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening. Now we talk to our Alexas and we can command people to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and whatnot. And I actually have benefited from those. My parents, I'll give you an example. I have older parents who live at home. And now it's amazing. My mom can say, Alexa, turn off the light or turn on the light if they have to wake up in the middle of the night. Guess what? It's not dark anymore. The light gets turned on. It's a real use case. You know, they won't trip and fall. So I'm like, thank you, Alexa. So I do think the power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next. And I think, you know, Sunil touched on it somewhat in our, in his keynote too. We are talking about autonomous data centers, right? That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of the Nutanix next generation shift and growth is going to come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also D Raj also mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street. And so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's going to balance the short term Wall Streeters and the long game that you guys play at Nutanix. So you got software transition in the middle of it, different economics. So software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software is going to be a nice impact across the long game. But Wall Street may not understand that software. And as you guys go the next level from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about it? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software. What's the orientation? What's your posture to the marketplace with the software play? That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dears likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right? And how do you balance the two? And yeah, we are disrupting a long established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription based consumption models. And we're doing that all at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? And I'll throw a channel in there too. You got a channel emerging. Your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially more logo expansion, more breath channel marketing on the table. New things. I mean the way I think about it as a marketer here is you know, Monica touched on this. How do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right? And then how do you take those to market through your sales organization? How do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself? Which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this. Because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week, they're really on top of this. They want to build out value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software. And then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has to think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to market? It's kind of a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. And you're open about it, so you recognize that it's happening. Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves that I think Wall Street likes. Valuational increase, yeah. So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already thinking ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little bit about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. Well good, yeah, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our year-up event last year in London was amazing, right? We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of the attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences, you see more existing users, right? And there may be some. And so we expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe. Copenhagen's a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet, but that's going to be exciting for us. It's taste. You won't tell anyone. And I'm sure he's going to be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He's the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. Well, he and Mark Hamill are right. Well, we're best friends now. And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. Like, I have a long list of people who've been in. Oh, you're killing us. No, he is. Yeah, Freddie Jackson. Well, you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience, right? And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right? Then, you know, that's a certain level of experience, but, you know, part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver with them. And that's the spirit of this show, right? You know, you guys do a great job. I want to highlight and also get your thoughts and I want you to share with the folks watching because you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but the balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities, kind of blend in on the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind a lot of the content? And how's that going to translate digitally because you guys mix it up. It's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry. Seems to reinforce the threads kind of connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? Yeah, well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonzo on my team. We have a strong, small, but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day, this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right? And people want to come to relax, to learn, and have fun too. And I think it's balancing the two, but it's not just, okay, it's Mark Hamill because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic in terms of the core customers we have. And I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet them afterwards. And so, okay, there's, and I was joking, hyperconvergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill. I said, hyperconvergence, hyperspace, right? There's ways to connect the two together, but there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way. And I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight, surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click and everything we do there. And we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this, surprise and delight. So, Manaka, who would your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next select? Your boss is right here. This is your chance to influence. Oh my God, okay, if you really want to know, he'll have to fly in from Bombay, India. The movie star, Shahrukh Khan, he's known as SRK, but he's a world famous icon. So there you go, next one, SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. You heard him. You heard him. Well, Ben, Manaka, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching the CUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next.