 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with ICOHOPE's youth piss car and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018 here in London. Might be a little gloomy outside, but we're talking about clouds and talking about developments inside. Happy to welcome to the program two of the GMs from the Nutanix team. First to my right, Raghu Nandan, joining us second time on theCUBE is the general manager of virtualization and management services and welcoming to the program first time guest and new to the Nutanix family, Nikola Bozinovich who came from the frame acquisition is the vice president and general manager of desktop services both with Nutanix gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you. All right, so Raghu, let's start with you. I actually commented listening to the keynote, there's a lot going on and I actually felt it was underplayed some of the things happening in the core. If you talk about just in AOS itself, you know, the really super importantly named 5.10 actually had a huge amount of things. It was like a total rewrite. Dearage this morning when he interviewed me said, yeah, you know, when you're flying the plane at 35,000 feet and it's going at full speed, you know, we're going to change the engines out. So let's start there, talk about your team and you know, what's happening. Yes, Stu, it's been four years almost for me at Nutanix and it's the pace never ceases. It's a thriving environment where there's constant innovation at every level of the stack and the grouping that we have now kind of done with the Nutanix core essentials and enterprise where enterprise starts creating this sandbox for a lot of the new tech and new markets and new buyers to kind of go find their own space. That's where the innovation is happening across all of these layers and the core has been pretty exciting between what's happening on Prism, on AHV, on just the new things around the autonomous extent store to drive over performance and the core storage stack to the next level even as we make ourselves not just appealing for VDI where we've really been a pretty good infrastructure of choice but also to next gen workloads, to cloud native workloads with the release of carbon. So it's clearly been a lot of activity but with focus so that we never cease upon core even as we evolve new products. All right, you mentioned the VDI word. So Nicola, let's go there. For those that watch the industry, we know Nutanix started out, you know, VDI desktop services, you know, one of the earliest and, you know, most productive applications. It was a good starting point to modernize your platform. People sometimes poke fun at VDI is like, you know, okay, hey, is now the year of VDI? I remember back a few years ago, you know, desktop as a service seemed a hot buzz, VMware made an acquisition of the space. I kind of lost track of it for a little bit but you know, I want you to bring this up to speed. You know, here we're getting to the end of 2018. You know, what is your marketplace? Because it seems very different now than it was 10 years ago when I started looking at this mess of an ecosystem and bring us up to, you know, kind of the cloud. There's one word that's changed desktop as a service and that's the cloud. You know, when people started talking about DAZ in 2010 or 2012 and desktop acquisition, I think that was 2013 or 14, that was way too early. You know, AWS wasn't a common name and, you know, Microsoft was just starting. Google barely had a cloud. You know, we started Frame in 2012 with pretty much the same goal of hyper-converging software part of the VDI stack as simple as that. You know, we as a user were thinking and rethinking how that VDI stack can look like in a multi-cloud world where everything should be working on top of different infrastructures, abstracting that complexity from the user, you know, yet providing them with simplicity and delight of a great user experience. And I think like that in rods that we've made, that Amazon made with Amazon Workspaces that are right now a multi-hundred million dollar business on AWS and the introduction of Microsoft's first-party product, Ignite this year, Windows Virtual Desktop. I think, you know, some of these years are going to be, you know, years of DAZ. You know, whether it's 2019, I believe it is. And at the same time, it's where these two worlds meet. It's the world of traditional VDI, where Nutanix has the best platform for enterprise VDI and, you know, mixing it with the cloud of Frame. Yeah, actually, so you mentioned some revenue numbers in there. What's the size of the market today? How fast is it growing? Do you have some data you can share? Yeah, so like, you know, just the overall market for VDI software, if you will, it's in the order of five billion dollars. Where, you know, the three players, that was like number from 2017. You got between Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, you know, and then some of the new players that I mentioned. The market's projected to grow about 22% year-over-year to about 13 billion dollars in 2023. So it's not growing triple digits, but it's growing in a very healthy way. And some of the key drivers are, desktop as a service, security, mobility, and hyper-convergence. So, you know, when you mix some of these elements, you get to see frame plus Nutanix as a very potent combination. So talking about that combination, right? So I know Nutanix from back in the day, nine years ago. And it was, you know, a VDI player, it was a nice box to run your desktop song. So now, you know, fast forward, nine years, Nutanix has acquired frame. So how do these two kind of combine and mix within new portfolio? Look at that, we live in a world where everybody's working together and at the same time, everybody's competing. Like it would be like, look at what Amazon's doing across the board, what Microsoft's doing, what Google is doing, you know? And I think that, you know, as Raghu mentioned, the speed at which Nutanix is moving, and I come from the startup world. My last 12 years have been in startups that I started, you know, from zero to about 100 people and the pace at which Nutanix moves is just amazing, which was the biggest draw for me and the team to come in is just kind of, I like to say, kind of it almost accelerated for us from the time when we got in. And it's kind of, with that pace, it comes kind of a new pattern where, you know, you're going to work together with partners, I mean Citrix, VMware, VDI is a great workload for Nutanix and it's going to continue to be a great workload wherever it makes sense. And where it makes sense to have, you know, a great multi-cloud product that is tightly integrated with the core, with the essentials that pulls in, as D-Rush talked about at a keynote and on the earnings call yesterday when it pulls in more of corns and essentials, you know, there is an option. And, you know, the fact that you have Amazon Workspace, it doesn't mean that you can't run, frame, or Citrix on AWS. Same goes for Microsoft, same goes for, you know, any other player outside of VDI. I think the critical thing there is the choice that's available for customers without having to make suboptimal decisions, right? So the choice that's whatever's best for your use case and we will never force customers down one path or another. AHB, for example, has grown, even as we continue to support V-Sphere and ESX, STL and Hypervisor on our platform, it's grown to this number of 38% that we disclose on the most recent earnings release. Not a single one of them was because customers were not presented with the choice of picking whatever Hypervisor was the best for them. So Ragu, choice is great, but one of the challenges that leads to customers is when they want to get their arms around the entire environment they have is the management of it. You know, when I look at the industry and say, you know, how are you doing with management of a single product, let alone kind of the heterogeneous mess that we end up with in IT typically, it's usually one of the top hot buttons environment. So I was Nutanix looking to address this. You're absolutely right. I think that's where prism plays a pretty significant role. The design philosophy that if something can't be done with a single click or a single click in the context of one or two steps, we should go back to the drawing board. And the great example there is what we've done with Citrix in the context of support for Citrix Cloud. Instant on, typically what might have been two, three different steps across different consoles, you can just go do that from a single place from inside prism, Hypervisors, vSphere. One click Hypervisor upgrades right from inside prism without having to go with the discrete management blocks, right? So the idea is that even as we provide choice, can we wrap that all under this one management, you know, overlay so that we can abstract the choice. So you pick the product for its capabilities, but the management on a day to day three basis is very abstracted for a simple generalist to be able to use. It's great actually, it's interesting to bring up Citrix because when I think about frame, Citrix has been a long time Nutanix partner, especially in the VDI space. Frame have a relationship with Citrix. What does that mean to kind of the ecosystem or does this cut Citrix out of the picture? No, I mean it most definitely doesn't cut Citrix out of the picture. I mean kind of that would be inconsistent with everything that we just talked about. Kind of frame was started six years ago, as I said, to reinvent the technology stack on the VDI side and to show people what's possible. It's built as cloud first product with multi-tenancy in mind, with role-based access control, security, microservices, containers, all of these things that were hard to do and were incredibly hard to do at the time when Citrix was inventing this category and making that transition is not easy. Like running a six-year-old technology company and needing to change something, you realize how hard must it be for someone who has been doing there for a lot longer. So the reality is we have new concepts every year, something new comes up, the last couple of years has been microservices, containers, increased focus on security and I think that's where we can move it really lightspeak. I'm everyday amazed with the velocity and that's what gets me up and sharing that vision with Raghu, with the team, across the board at Nutanix, at the core, Essentials and the enterprise level is just kind of, I'm having time of my life. So talk to us a little bit about, you're talking about the improved speed of development, you can now do stuff you couldn't do before. So talk to us about the future of frame within Nutanix. What's it going to look like? So again, three things that we're really focused on are this kind of multi-cloud vision where from the single pane of glass, everything, Amazon resource, Microsoft resource, Google resource, Xi resource or your cluster should look the same. And we can barely catch up with complexities of all of these clouds. It would be unfair to ask an enterprise administrator to do the same thing. It would be impossible. At the same time, there are great things happening. Microsoft leads the way in some areas, Amazon leads the way in other areas. Kind of why don't give different customers a choice to use those things and eventually migrate them from one place to another, which is again something that we demoed, Sunil demoed earlier today. So multi-cloud is number one, creating that incredible user experience, like that delight, one-click-ness, everything's intuitive, consumer-grade design. I mean, that's the DNA that we share with Nutanix. And then having all the right features. So again, these days all the who plays about security and roll-based ask-and-control, can you add your Octane one-click? Can you connect to your Azure AD in one click? And then finally kind of it is security. And frame, for example, was built from the ground up to support secure App and Desktop delivery and to make those services secure. So it's the only FedRAMP-ready desktop as a service. So that means it is a dare right now in general availability for US, federal, government, and state and local. Services use, everything runs by default. Kind of it used to be a feature, encryption. So everything is encrypted by default. Everyone runs in FIPS mode. So every single component runs at the highest level of security and then if things happen, things are contained. So those are some things that are impossible to do with legacy architectures. Now take all of that goodness and converge that with the rest of the portfolio and think about the cross-product synergies. Like Prism Pro, for example, does a lot of right-sizing recommendations for VMs today. Our constrained VMs, under-provisioned, over-provisioned VMs, bully VMs, that can immediately apply to all of the frame provisioned desktops. Flow does a pretty good job of creating these micro firewall instances to secure ingress and egress routes for VMs. Imagine that policy that when a frame desktop spins up in XI, will immediately be portable. So it makes hybrid invisible. So those are the kinds of- And beam as well. And the casting on the beam and the economics and the utilization management on beam. So the cross-product synergies of what's possible in the future are just endless. So Rekha, we heard from Nikolai as to kind of what it means to now be part of Nutanix. In your GM role, what are some of the key kind of KPIs and metrics? How do you measure internally and report out as to your success of your team? I think the culture at Nutanix is one where it's this foundational in the builder owner mindset where you're accountable for the business and you identify are there leverage points in which you go to market. Like for example, AOS does great in terms of hyper-converged platform. And Prism Pro is a natural add-on for environments that need optimization choices versus these new products at the tier of being Nutanix Enterprise. Some of them have to figure out their own go-to-market which might overlap with traditional Nutanix go-to-market in the context of beam, for example. It's a pure SaaS go-to-market where you have to target a distinct buyer. So that's been the interesting journey of Nutanix for all of us GMs to figure out how do you create a blueprint of a three, four, five-year plan for how the product needs to mature, target the first buyer, the adjacent buyer, even as we build these multi-products that have synergies between them. Nicola Ragu, thank you so much for all of the updates. For you, Piscar, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 here in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE.