 from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering .next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to NextConf, hashtag NextConf. This is Nutanix big customer event. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. And this is our wrap, day one wrap, Stu. We had the practitioner day today. Interesting setup for Nutanix. They have the keynotes at the end of day one, which is kind of interesting. Most companies have it at the beginning of the day. And Dave, part of that was just logistically. This convention center, while it's kind of massive, there was another show wrapping up, so they had to shuffle things around. And the advice I'd given them was, well, who do we put on? Well, put on some of the partners that we already had announcements and give us users. I mean, Dave, more users, more users, more users, they deliver. So, yeah, absolutely. And I want to talk about that. Well, let's get right into it. I mean, every customer we talked to today had similar themes, right? Simplifying, getting rid of the non-differentiated heavy lifting, reducing the IT labor pain. And all of them that we talked to were using Acropolis, selectively. They all loved VMware, but they were using Acropolis to make sure that there was a level playing field with regard to not only the right workloads, but also just sending a message to VMware that, hey, we have options. Yeah, Dave, the thing I loved about the customers, I think about the scholastic interview we did. We went 10 minutes into the interview before we talked to the head of infrastructure about his infrastructure. We were talking about digital transformation, how they're helping children read, and it's underneath that invisible infrastructure happens to be from Nutanix is helping them to do that. Same thing, talked about with PXP, said, it's not, oh, you know, my infrastructure's a little better, it's how do I allow my IT staff to do what he called the fun stuff? And that meant, you know, I'm working on the analytics, I'm, you know, digging into Splunk and getting more, you know, value out of my data. That digital transformation is something that the customers here are embracing. The hybrid multi-cloud, maybe not as much yet, so Nutanix is a little bit of a head of their customers there, but right, so some real good, you know, customers that are embracing change and building that platform for the future in Nutanix's department. You know, the question I always have, because I always talk about, oh, everybody's doing the digital disruption, they got to get rid of the banal infrastructure tasks, shift that to our digital transformation and analytics initiatives, data initiatives. Sounds good, but that's not easy, and the gentleman from PXP sort of underscored that. It took some time, we had to do some training, people process technology, the people in process stuff that is hard. So that's something that's very interesting, I think, to me, Stu, is this shift that's going on, we talk about it in true private cloud, $150 billion going out of heavy lifting, going into vendor R&D, true private cloud and public cloud, and true private cloud is the fastest growing sector, so if you look at infrastructure as a service, software as a service and true private cloud, those are the explosive growth areas, virtually everything else in the enterprise is in flat or declining mode. Absolutely, Dave, and got to talk to a number of partners that are helping Nutanix expand where they're going. We're going to hear, Google's going to be in the keynote, Diane Greene, one we're looking forward to, the announcement today, Wall Street gave Nutanix a little bit of a bump and gives them some added credibility into why Nutanix should be considered a cloud partner, and actually it was Scholastic said that he really saw Google as thought leadership in containers and Kubernetes and something they're starting to look at and therefore gives him more reason that when he deploys it, he's going to turn to Nutanix to help him look at it, talk to Intel, talk to IBM, so some companies expanding what kind of applications are living on Nutanix and some good thought leaders talking about, right, how IT can continue to be sustained differentiation in the marketplace, something that I know is near due to your heart. So Julia from Gartner was very guarded in her comments, I thought, very excellent comments, but when we tried to sort of push her into the horses on the track conversation, she kind of stayed neutral. Okay, that's cool, but we like to riff independent thoughts on theCUBE. So Nutanix, for a couple of years now, has been sort of pivoting away from so-called hyper-converged infrastructure as everybody else moves to hyper-converged infrastructure and they're pivoting to cloud. And the obvious next wave is that what the Furrier calls inter-clouding, you know, extending that control plane across multiple physical entities, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, on-prem, off-prem, legacy, et cetera, managing that. There's a lot of companies that are trying to do that. In your opinion, is that something that Nutanix should be doing, could be doing, will be doing? What are your thoughts on that? Yes, so Nutanix, if they built up the stack, we've said before, I think we said on the intro, Dave, Nutanix is looking to be like the next VMware. What does VMware need to do? VMware needs to know how they fit into that world that you just laid there. That's why, you know, pack elves that are made, bold move, going to partner with Amazon. Nutanix has a little bit of a relationship with both AWS and Azure. Looks like they're going to have a deeper relationship with Google to really expand what they're doing. They've made a few acquisitions in the market. It was Calm.io, was one that they acquired right before VMworld last year, and that is some of their really management layer, that control plane as to how they're going to look at managing in that multi-cloud world. Now, does a customer turn to Nutanix? Do they turn to some of the stalwarts in the IT management space? Do they turn to the public clouds? Nutanix needs to prove this out, expand their roadmap, and get more customers excited. I believe, you know, we've said sometimes, it's the smallest show, it's about 4,500 people. It's what they're expecting here at the show. It's a good size for a company that just went public, not yet at a billion dollars, and impressive, always good enthusiasm when we come to this show. And expecting lots, high bar for what they should be delivering in the keynotes. All right, so good first day. We're coming at you tomorrow. We'll kick off with an assessment of the keynotes. And then tomorrow's a lot of Nutanix content. It's going to be great. We've got their executives on, some of their partners, we're going to have D Raj, who's always a great guest, very thoughtful. Couple more customers too. Yeah, and more customers. So keep right there. If you want us to ask questions of some of these guests, you can tweet us. He's at Stu, I'm at D Vellante. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news from this and other shows. Check out wikibon.com for all the research. Okay, that's it. We're out. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching everybody.