 The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud in the distance. It's expanding, it's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multi-cloud is the next big thing in infrastructure. And at the recent Nutanix.next conference, we got a major dose of that theme. And with me, to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkin Maynard, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to theCUBE. Great to be back here. Great to see you there. Okay, so you just completed another.next. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multi-cloud. And I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but Tarkin, what were your impressions coming out of the event? Look, I mean, you had a great entry to this. Our goal is, as Monica is now out by two, cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. Our customers basically using cloud as a business model, it's an operating model, it's not just about your techno-mamba jumbo, it's kind of new outline. You wanna make sure you make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, you wanna make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use cases, partner ecosystem with ISPs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs. We recommend like Citrix and user computing like Red Hat on cloud native. And also bringing right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer used to cloud as an operating model. That was the big story here. Great, thank you, Monica. Anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? Well, I think Tarkin said it, right? We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was a big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio which is much more simplified now, it's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we're building an ecosystem around it. And really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. So Monica, could you just for our audience just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? Yeah, we actually made four different announcements and most of them were focused around obviously our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to a cloud platform to help customers build modern software defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting the business critical applications. And that was really about the next version of our flagship AOS 6 availability. We announced a general availability of that. And key features really enable, included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software and skills are now built into a platform. And most importantly, all of this functionality being managed for a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So there was one announcement. The second announcement was focused on data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2X, big data workloads by 3X. So lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is the new unstructured data governance service. So again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships and we'll talk more about that is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix clusters in Azure. And that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so now we're in preview on that one and we're super excited about that. And then last but not least, and I know Tharkin's going to go into a lot more detail is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of great news coming out of it. I just give you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this as well. Okay, now I'd like to give you my honest take. If you guys don't mind, I'm talking, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me. Okay, so but so the first thing I'm going to say is I think Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial. And I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years and to actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload and any cloud. And then what you're doing is I see it as abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem across clouds. And as they say, that's hard. I will say this, the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort. And very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multi-cloud opportunity, which again is really challenging. But my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets. But from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multi-cloud, you're on that journey that I've seen to date. So I would give you a high marks there and I like the ecosystem building piece of it. So Tarkin, you could course correct anything that I've said and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village. You're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that as well. Look, actually you hit all the right points and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago, the last two years with Monica, with the great executive team and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. You're not necessarily passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. You're passionate about customer outcomes. And some of those outcomes sometimes gonna also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multi-cloud. It is not multi-cloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. You wanna make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, better those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dowl, Supermicrob, we just announced a partnership with Supermicro now reselling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake, Lenovo, we run on TrueScale, big support for Lenovo. Dowl's still a great partner to us on cloud partnerships. As Monica mentioned, obviously Azure, we had a big session with AWS, Luxo, New York Conan with Red Hat as an ISP partner, tying that also to IBM cloud as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM cloud go hand in hand. And also, tons of work around as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We wanna make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we wanna make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest opposite on the EUC site, as Monica mentioned earlier, you also just announced a Red Hat partnership for cloud services right before the dot next, you highlighted that and you're super excited about those two partnerships. Yeah, so when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, you know, it's not, it's clear to me, you're not just wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And again, that's why it's hard to take advantage of those things. But so Monica, you were on the stage at dot next with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. Absolutely, first of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix clusters in Azure. It's a big deal we've been working on for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And obviously we're looking forward to that announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We already seem tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industry research by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourself. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources. And most importantly, there's a disparity between, you know, the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's why, that's where we are focused on together is partners is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads at Azure cloud. You know, do cloud disaster recovery. You know, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is a partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native. And that's something we've already, you know, provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on Nutanix.com slash Azure. And I would say for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to Nutanix.com slash Azure and taking the test drive. Excellent. Tarkin, we saw recently that you announced services. You got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, there as a service, which is called TrueScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way. Face to face, awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? So look, as we talk through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship, one of our fastest growing partnerships. Our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX as the platform. But beyond that, now if the customers want to use HPE services as a service, now Nutanix software, the entire stack is not the only multi-cloud platform. The database capability, EUC capability, storage capability can run on HPE service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, if you're doing a similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, given our customer's choice. If they want to go to a public cloud, partner like Azure or AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this. We are GSI partnerships and new service provider program. We're giving options to customers because in some other regions, HPE might not be our choice or Azure might not be choice and a local telco might be choice in some country like Japan or India. So they give options and capability to customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. Well, I think that's a really important point you're making because as I see all these infrastructure providers who are traditionally on-prem players introduce as a service. One of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customer's choice? Because that's really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose, of course they want to sell their own. But if you innovate fast enough, which of course Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as a service models. So Monica, Tarkin mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, you know, I do want to make sure, you know, our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix today is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of, you know, platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing here forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously when you say, you know, one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS in global 2000 accounts, you know, across many different industries, you know, retail, financial services, energy. And we are really focused, for example, with them on expanding our joint business around machine critical applications, deployment in our customer accounts and specifically our databases with Nutanix era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution scale DB, we showcased at .next just yesterday. And scale DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers, which includes the Nutanix platform, including Nutanix era, which is our database service, along with, you know, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware software that they, that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Sixterra, who in fact was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many of the service providers, including working with, you know, OVH cloud, Equinix. So I can go on, we have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us, all the way from, as Tharkin said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat Citrix, and of course, our service provider and GSI partnerships. And then last but not least, I think Tharkin, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. No, absolutely, you're absolutely right, Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSI's support. New SP program, enterprise solution provider, service provider program, covering TALCOs and regional service providers. Like you suggested, OVH in France and TT in Japan. Yoda Group in India, Sixer in the US. We have only 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things obviously to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely with Christian Alvarez who's running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was an important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about club by itself, it's outcomes, but club is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multi-club fashion. And last point I would add to this is, help customers regardless of the stage they're in, in their club migration, from re-hosting, to re-platforming, re-purchasing, or re-factoring, re-architecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what you're trying to do with Monica's help with the entire team, choice, choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud and choice on platform. So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman, the state of the art was converged infrastructure at the time, bolting together storage, networking and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, we're going to have a software led version of that. And you popularized, you kind of created the hyper-converged infrastructure market. You created what we had called at the time, true private cloud, scaled up as a company. And now you're really going after that, that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud opportunity, Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud. And the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers last year just spent $100 billion on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking. So I like it, you got to move fast and you are. So guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both maybe talking, you can start and Monica, you can bring us home, give us your wrap up, your summary and any final thoughts. All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back, this is like a broken record, but it's so important to hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination, it's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. Great, thank you, Monica. Yeah, and I again, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this, but I'll remind everybody that while we started out, you know, our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And as you can see, coming out of .next, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multi-cloud platform so our customers can really have run any app and even any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because of our, you know, our customers love us, NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But again, it's the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice and really our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .next where I meet a lot of those customers. And now again, we've been following you guys since the early days, I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix will be there reporting and really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. And as always, we'll see you next time.