 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 .NEXT here in Copenhagen. We're of course here at the Nutanix show, we're wrapping up a fantastic two-day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, been co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Simon Taylor. He is the CEO of Haiku, a good friend of theCUBE. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's such a pleasure to be here. It's great to see you guys again. And you're our final guest. So this is, it's a very good- I'll try to stay interesting. No pressure, so. Keep your energy up. Yes. So for our viewers who are not as familiar with Haiku, tell us a little bit about your business and how you are a strategic partner of Nutanix. Sure, sure. So Haiku actually is a software company that focuses on data protection as a service. We actually started by spinning out of a much larger company called ComTrain that had about 1,000 engineers and was doing all sorts of things, but they had an amazing talent for building backup and recovery software. My vision was really that we could move up the value chain and we could establish ourselves as our own brand as long as we could find a place in the market that was fast-growing, building like a rocket ship, and was really requiring a new kind of data protection and backup. And honestly, as soon as we saw Nutanix, we sort of fell in love. We realized that they had developed an entirely new category of business with Hyperconverged and they were really a pioneer in that space. So what we said is, why don't we build the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix? That's exactly what we did. And I think, you know, Stu was actually one of the first people to ever hear about it. We came on theCUBE and we talked about that. We've GA'd that in 2017 in July, I think, at that dot next. So just two and a half years later, we now have 1,200 customers and we're in 62 countries around the world. So it's been absolutely astonishing. It's been wonderful growth. We're seeing 300% year-over-year growth. And really a lot of that is just based on our ability to protect the data of Nutanix customers around the world. Well, and Simon, right, that early question was, is Nutanix going to be big enough to support ISVs that, you know, can run, you know, grow their business underneath them? Before we get further and talk about mine and everything, give us a little bit, you know, the state of the state for Haiku because it started with Nutanix, but that's not the only solution that you're offering today. So just give us kind of a snapshot of the whole business. You know, I think what we realized, Stu, as we were building out Haiku and this purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix, we said that's the on-prem, you know, but there's a lot of on-prem that is still legacy three-tier architecture. So we added a VMware product, but really the goal was to offer true multi-cloud data protection as a service. So what we did is we built the independent purpose-built backup and recovery service for Nutanix, one for VMware, then we built the world's first purpose-built backup as a service for Google Cloud, and I'm really thrilled to announce that next month we're launching Azure Backup as well. And the brilliant thing about our system and our solution is that we actually enable customers to not only backup their data independently for that cloud, but that then migrate their data to whatever other cloud they want to use. So it actually becomes data protection as a service, data migration, and DR. So for customers, this is wonderful, but how is it to be strategic partners with all of these big players? Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you have to place your bets, right? So if you notice, I didn't say AWS, and almost every company that I talked to says, why wouldn't you start with AWS? They're the biggest. You know, that's never been our philosophy. You know, I think the fact that we attached ourselves to Nutanix so early, not just because they were rocket ship on fire, but also because we truly believed in their vision. We believed in the Nutanix products. We love Derage's entire philosophy around simplicity and customer delight. And we felt like we could be students of Nutanix. We could actually build out our product with those same philosophies and principles in mind. You know, so I think really going deep with Nutanix is number one for us and remains number one. I would also say though that, you know, Google's been an excellent partner, Microsoft's been an excellent partner. So with the large cloud providers, you have to take a different approach. You cannot offer a downloadable product, right? All of our public cloud backup and recovery is a true managed service. You go into their app store, you turn it on rather than download it, you configure and you're able to perform all your backup and do all your recovery right from the console. All right, so Simon, let's get into the kind of the guts of what's happening at Nutanix. Mine, of course, is a partnership to extend for data protection partnering with Veeam and Haiku as the first two partners. The other thing that everybody's pretty excited about is Zyclusters. And that sounds like, and we've talked to Nutanix people, as Nutanix brings their stack into the clouds, not just on the clouds, will that pull things like mine along with them? And so give us what you're seeing with mine first and maybe Zyclusters along. Yeah, so maybe we start with mine, right? This whole concept that I think that these guys have pioneered, and they've done a really terrific job of it. I think that the vision there, and I count Mark Niedermeyer in this group and Tim Isaacs and some wonderful folks on the product team at Nutanix, their vision was there's Rubrik and there's Cohesity, there's these sort of large secondary storage platforms. Personally, when I look at them, what I see is Nutanix with a backup workload, right? And I think that Nutanix being the original is the best. It's the most complete solution and it's very, very comprehensive. So I think that Nutanix folks understood this intuitively and their idea was instead of us building our own backup and going after that space, we've got amazing partners like Haiku, why don't we just natively integrate them into the mine platform and offer that sort of secondary storage workload as a key part of Nutanix's product proposition? So the really exciting thing for us is that we are skewed up with Nutanix. Nutanix will be able to resell Haiku as a part of mine. And I think that's going to really complete their entire story when it comes to being able to own the data center and really own the sort of cloud in general. I think your second question, Stu, was about clusters. And I think that the answer there is very simple. Multi-cluster has become extremely important for Nutanix customers. They've done a great job of going after that. The simple fact is if you don't support ZY clusters as a backup vendor, you really can't compete in this market. So I'm really thrilled to announce, of course, that Haiku is the first backup recovery vendor that does support ZY clusters. Okay, so interestingly, you talked about how you hadn't done a solution for AWS. Sounds like this might be a path for you to get with Nutanix onto AWS. Absolutely, absolutely. And again, for us, it's not about looking for some Trojan horse or backdoor into a go-to-market strategy. It's about making sure that the customers are truly delighted by the value that we provide. And I think that when we go after a specific market, we want to do it the best. So we don't go shallow and just sort of check the box. We want to make sure, for example, when we build out Azure, that we're not just dealing with the general principle of backing up and keeping things consistent. We want to make sure the applications people are running on Azure are supported by Haiku. That's what we do with Nutanix. That's what we do with GCP. We want to always go as deep as possible so we can really complement the platform in a really, really comprehensive way. One of the things you said earlier was that your philosophy is very much aligned with Nutanix. Your end goal to simplify and delight the customer, this much more intuitive user interface. So talk a little bit about how you said you wanted to become a student of Nutanix. How this cross-company learning is very interesting to me. What have you learned? What have you learned and how do you go about being tutored by your customer? So you know, I'm a very visual guy, right? And whenever I think about Nutanix, I always had this image in my head, whatever I thought about legacy 3-tier architecture and the move to hyper-converged rather. I always pictured an 80s stereo system. Remember those big 80s boxes and they have all the graphic equalizers all the way down and some kid would come and push them all down, you could never reset the darn things. And then along comes automation and suddenly you press a button and you listen to jazz and it sounds like good jazz and the treble and the bass all fix themselves. I effectively think that Nutanix brought that same concept funnily enough into the data center. They simplified so much that was impossible to handle for admins across the world. They made it so simple to use their product that actually the customers could start to enjoy their work more. And I really love that, that's a true, that's a really intangible sort of value proposition that I think people don't talk about enough. Yes, you want to save time, yes, you want to save money, but if you could enjoy your job more as a result of getting a product, what's better than that? So I think that philosophy is something we baked into haiku in the following ways. You know, the first is when we were designing the UI, we wanted it to look and feel like the platform it supports. So when you use haiku for Nutanix, it looks like prism. When you are using our console for GCP, you're going to feel like you're using GCP. The idea is that backup and recovery should be an extension of that cloud expression, that platform, so that a customer who is an expert with that platform can easily manage this with no training at all. So again, driving that simplicity right there into the platform. So Simon, you know one of the things we love to do is get, hear from customers and what they're doing. Of course, you've got 1200 customers that are Nutanix customers. So we'd love to hear any insight you have, in a lot of discussion about AHV, in the last 12 months has been about half of the deployments there. Anything around AHV or any of the new software features and products and experiences that Nutanix has been launching that you hear customers buzzing and talking to you about. Sure, I mean the first thing I would say is it is truly a multi-cloud world now. I think that legacy vendors that are having a harder and harder time coping with the fact that cloud washing no longer works. If you show up to the market and you say, oh this now I can deploy an agent into this cloud, it's sort of stop, stop. Don't say agent around me. So I think the ability to really natively integrate into any of these clouds and support all of these clouds equally is key. So in the past a vendor would start with one thing and it would be great. And I won't use names here but then they would do something else. They might move to another hypervisor and it was a little bit less great. And I think that that notion has to change in a multi-cloud world, which brings me to the concept of AHV. I think that AHV has really grown. I mean I would say that right now over half of our customers are AHV customers. And I would say that that grows every single quarter. And it not only grows in terms of net new logos, it also grows in terms of existing customers that we're finding want to switch to AHV and they want to switch fast. You know, they don't want to pay the V-Tax anymore but more than that I think they're seeing AHV as a really robust enterprise hypervisor that really meets the complete need for the customer. And I think that's been terrific to watch. So when you hear at .next, and this is not your first .next, what kinds of conversations are you having? What's been interesting to you? What are you going to take back to Haiku? You head back to Brookline. Yeah, I mean obviously there's all the new stuff. I mean Kubernetes, containers. I think these are all things we've been working on for some time. We'll have some surprises for you guys in Q4, the end of Q4 around that. But I think the big takeaway for me is we spent the first two years building our brand, getting the word out there, proving to companies and customers around the world that we were truly enterprise ready. Because we were the new kid on the block and you have to sort of start somewhere and show that. I think now we added physical last year, we added tape support. We've really got all of the major applications covered at this point. I think that conversation, we've checked the box. So today's conversations are about what's next. How much more deeply will you integrate with Nutanix? How can I use Nutanix to then manage my data in the cloud and bring it back again? And can Haiku support that or will it distract me? And the simple answer is it will support that completely because it's so natively integrated. And again, I think when you choose a platform at this stage and this is something we've seen again and again and again, people do not want a second silo in order to run their backup recovery. Customers who are choosing Nutanix or are choosing any platform want to run that platform and they want to make that one holistic experience. They want to reduce the training required and they want to make sure they get the most out of their investment. So where I think two or three years ago, Stu, when we first met, everybody was trying new things. It was sort of, there were all these new platforms and it was all very exciting. I think now people are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the platforms they fundamentally believe in and we're thrilled about that because we support those platforms and we'll continue to do so. Great. Excellent. Well, Simon, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a real pleasure talking to you and- It's been great. Yes, no, absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. That wraps up two brilliant days in Copenhagen at the Bella Center at Nutanix.next. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you next time.