 from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE live broadcast from Nutanix, .NEXT, in Nice, France. To help me wrap up for today's coverage, happy to have Yen Suldner, who is a consultant, does media, writes her system, organizations, someone I've gotten to know at some industry events over the last couple of years. So Yen, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks Stu, thanks for inviting me, and happy to be here at Nutanix Next Conference, awesome event, and I think the vendor has a bright future in front of him. Well, so, you know, we're a year after Nutanix IPO'd, the attendance at this show doubled, absolutely, you know, every Nutanix show, and I've been at all five of them, you know, customers are usually, they're enthusiastic, it's self-selecting, right? You go to a VM world, you come to a Nutanix show, you know, Veritas, you know, some of these shows, Veeam's show, you know, usually the customers, if it's a good measure of how the company's doing, and you know, Barometer is, customers are happy, they like what they're doing. One of the things I like about Nutanix customers is they aren't just, you know, oh, we love everything and we believe everything Nutanix has. It was like, hey, calm, well, you know, talk to a couple of customers that've used it, and they're like, it's great, but everybody else is like, yeah, I'm waiting to get my hands on it and really beat it up and we'll see if it does what it is, because Nutanix has proven themselves and needs to continually, you know, prove themselves time and again, really, I think, something that reminds me of the cloud era, because if I'm buying from public cloud and I'm buying from a consumption basis, if I don't like something, I'll move, I'll stop paying. So what's been catching your ear and eye at the show so far? What have you liked? What are you still questioning and want to learn more about? I thought there's a lot of good things coming, actually, like the new version 5.5, which will be out end of this year or so we hear. So that's like brings, I would say, some good incremental innovation, nothing overly massive, but some good stuff in there. But then, of course, like the future looking stuff, calm, sigh, and so on. So that looks pretty promising, but as you said, like it's not available right now and we want to get my hands dirty. Yeah, so what you like is if you talk to the customers that are deeply involved, they've probably been beta testing a lot of the stuff in 5.5. Some of the features get out in the community edition. The keynote they talked about NVMe was one that them tested. Anything particular that you've been hearing, customers that chomping at the bit, interested 5.5, oh, great, finally we have that. I think the generic compute platform is a good thing. So in order to enable new use cases like SAP stuff, HANA, maybe you need for Oracle licensing, this kind of stuff. So are you talking about what they would think they call AC2? Yeah. Which that's not in 5.5, I don't believe, no? Oh, then I got the wrong impression, okay. And to be honest, that's one of the critiques sometimes is you go look at this and you get the keynote and it's a deluge of so much stuff, you need the cheat sheet. So I look through Nutanix, they did a press release, there's like floor blog posts. It takes a little while for those of us to look at this to sort it through and be like, oh wait, which of this, as you said, 5.5? Oh, does that mean I can do it today? Oh well, it's coming real soon and if you're a beta person you can do it as opposed to the object storage and AC2 type pieces. If I remember right, and I'm sure Nutanix will watch and tell us if we got it wrong though, was a coming future, we'll let you know when we have a date. Little bit different now as a public company too. A lot of these, they don't pin down on certain quarters of dates because then that impacts financial reporting. Right, yeah. Talk to us about, you were obviously at the keynote. What else have you been doing? What sessions have you been going to? What's been happening? Ah, we had a lot of background talks with the Nutanix executive leadership, like Sunil Poti right before our talk here. And we've talked actually in depth about questions the other journalists and I had, like, calm, when will it be available? How will it be priced? What can you do? Can you move apps from one cloud to the other, not in the near future, maybe in the more distant future? It looks pretty promising and for a cloud management person that is one of my main jobs out there in the normal life, then it looks pretty good actually, but as you said, getting the hands dirty is an essential part and maybe that's coming a little bit too short here to really see what's happening and not just announcements and announcements. Absolutely, I mean, if you were to place bets on what are the important pieces in the future? Calm and Xi, absolutely something Nutanix has been talking a lot, super important that they get it right. You've been tracking calm since the acquisition, any nuances, what do they need to do? What's going to be ready? What do they need to have in the future to really make that work? Yeah, and I think they absolutely want to get it right. I think in the grand scheme of things, like delivering it like two weeks earlier or later in a like five years race with the competition is not making such a huge difference. So rather than delivering a mature and unready product, yeah, how do you say, like filing the edges off and making it smooth should take some time. However, me as a technical person, I like to get my hands on the stuff and really see it. So that's the downside. Okay, getting your hands dirty is something that a lot of the customers here like to do. Do you get into play with the community edition and the like? Not yet, but I have a Nutanix 400 cluster waiting in our data center ready for installation and we want to compare it like how it runs with VSphere and how it runs with AHVs. So that's HyperFV, I think it's unlikely workload actually. Yeah, so we've been here in the last couple of shows, AHVs really been front and center. It's an interesting mix for them to balance because even if about a third of customers of Nutanix are running AHV, that means two thirds of customers still are running one of the other hypervisors out there. Probably the other. And even I put the question Nutanix and I said, what is victory? What is the ultimate goal? And it's not 100% AHV. They're not looking to become a hypervisor company. It's they want to be a platform, work in the multi-cloud world. So when you talk to companies, how does that discussion go? Is AHV a central discussion point or is it some of the features that come along with it that help? I would say it's rather on the sidelines. I think it makes sense from economic point of view like not having to pay additional licenses, obviously, and getting the impression, getting the right kind of like experience with the product. And even Nutanix I think they say, if the customer wants this and this and this extra, they say, hey, go get vSphere. We are offering you a standard path like with the 80% of the features that you really, really need. And those 20 super esoteric stuff like fault tolerance that nobody is really using in vSphere, they are not bringing it to AHV. They're keeping the product clean, simple, easy. Yeah, so you said cloud management, say kind of a main focus error view. What does Nutanix have to do to be a strong player in that market over the next two years? I think they're actually on a good way already with the calm stuff. That thing is like we need to see it if we can compete with the other players out there, VM there and Redhead and you name it basically. And then to see if it gets accepted in the market, how the car marketplace takes off and so on. I think the adoption, if it gains significant adoption, if there is traction in the market, in the blogosphere and so on, I think that's crucial. So you mentioned VMware and Redhead. I mean, big companies, gigantic ecosystems. I mean, we all know the VMware ecosystem and I mean Redhead, open source, everybody's there, been at Redhead Summit for many years now. Any others that you'd say who they should be kind of matching up as customers will be? I think computer associates has a good valid offering but we personally see in the German market most of the time we realize automation. We've written through books on it, my brothers and I, so that's maybe we are a little bit opinionated and biased here in this case. But VMware is doing a good job and in this cloud management space and of course they have a tight integration with the other products like NSX that they have and I think Nutanix is very eager to catch up in these areas where they have gaps. One of the underlying simmering conversations at a Nutanix event is that kind of VMware, Nutanix relationship, and we talked about still lots of Nutanix deployments are using VMware. Didn't feel that they were bashing VMware at this event but what are you seeing when you talk to customers and you use a lot of VMware? How's that relationship, are there any challenges there or things that are concerning? But at the end of the day it's the customer's decision what they are going for. I think most of the customers might not go all in Nutanix but only place it like in certain use cases and so on. And of course VMware is not happy why should they be and they are positioning their vSAM product which is running quite well pretty aggressively but Nutanix has a different storyline. I think it's not only about the IOPS and it's about the simplicity of the whole thing and offering the customer a real simple path to manage it in a cloud, cloud-enabled fashion and that's where they're really doing a good job. However VMware they can cover everything but you can configure so many little things and that makes the whole thing huge and complicated and of course any use case can somehow be tailored to but also if you have a vendor who has a real good storyline of simplicity like Nutanix they have a good chance here. Yeah there was a lot of discussion it was interesting we've talked at Nutanix they talk about they want to get one click it's about simplicity. Then there's all of this learning from what other customers have done I've got artificial intelligence starting to help in there. How do you see that trend going as to if I'm an administrator is it reducing the number of clicks or am I going to be able to kind of let go of the reinsome and allow some other tooling and you know knowledge bases really drive some of that decision making. I think that's pretty helpful to have these like expert knowledge knowledge bases built in there's also a startup that does the similar thing in the VMware space runecast great guys and so on. So that's good but it's also like challenging I would say for partners that they really need to see that with Nutanix of course we are going to sell as a partner you're going to sell less like wrecking and stacking of servers. You as a partner you really need to refocus learn the orchestration learn the automation get into a container stuff in order to offer to your customers a valuable offering a value proposition. So everybody needs to learn and I think Nutanix makes the life easier in these like mundane day-to-day activities. So that's I would say a good benefit of getting such an environment. All right so again we're about the halfway mark of the event any other key takeaways customer conversations that you'd want to share? Well I've talked to a couple of partners friends of mine from the VMware instructor community and they say we are going all in Nutanix so that was pretty impressive here and it's also what I heard not only from those who are actually doing it but of course from the Nutanix management easy to understand why they say this so I think there is a huge traction so some partners seem to got the message and seem to say yeah we are going all in so that was one of the things and of course like I'll go a little bit more technical tomorrow so the day to day was really packed with the official schedule tomorrow is a little bit more free so I'll have a couple of more conversations with actual customers from a large Swiss bank where we'll be doing the VRS implementations soon but they're also into Nutanix so they're both a VMware and a Nutanix partner so we'll meet up later on and yeah that's pretty much the schedule. I never do this but you got any questions for me for the wrap? What I would like to know is like what's your take on the micro segmentation part of Nutanix can compete with the other offerings and I have not really looked at it so far it looked pretty impressive to me in the keynote. So look I'll say two pieces one is it's one of the top items that I've heard from users that they are super excited about so there was a bank site just interviewed earlier today I think financial services and service providers were really excited for the micro segmentation that being said I've also talked to a bunch of the partner community and of course it's the typical well how much is Nutanix doing versus what the partner oh we've had this in our much more future rich and the like so it's good to see Nutanix moving down this line they need to balance how much they'll do versus what some of their partners that are especially deeper in the networking space can do there so it's definitely one that talk to customers that are getting and digging into it but yeah it's a good one and definitely when you talk about those features coming out that one that customers have been asking for a bit so like VMware it has done in the past a lot of times there's probably a lot of customers that what's built in is going to be good enough but then if I really need the Cadillac of it and I might need to pull in some best of breed partner to be able to compete it so cool. All right. It also happens here. Yeah. If you look at the partner ecosystem it's also pretty impressive and most of the named guys are in here. All right well, Jens Oldner, a pleasure catching up with you thanks for helping us here on theCUBE and we're wrapping up day one of two days of live coverage of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.