 Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching the CUBE SiliconANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix.next here in Nice, France. Happy to have joined with me, first time guest, John McAdam, who's the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix, the show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start just for people who aren't familiar, I said you know, you're CEO of F5, you know, for quite a few years. Just give us a little bit about, you know, your background in business and, you know, what brings you here? Yeah, I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994 and I became President of Sequent in 1995 and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, President and Chief Operating Officer, big server company is what we did at the time, mainly selling Oracle type databases running in the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in 99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM and then I was head hunted by F5 Networks and I joined them in 2000, just as .com, Bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years. And during the last few years, I joined the board of Tableau as you mentioned and a company called Aptio as well based in Seattle and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are, you know, everything from, you know, CIOs to people that someday might want to be, you know, a CIO, but very much kind of a mix of a blend of business and technology. Can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not, you know, the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people. What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because I, the board member, the board, the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join a board. And I kept saying, no, I don't need to do that. I'm really busy focusing the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive. You know, so I'm a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5. So why would I want to join a board? And then eventually I actually got approached, first of all, by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time and it seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO and I thought I could add some value there in terms of growing the company, et cetera. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I am really, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance, things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially in eutonychs. Okay, your career, you know, we've had, you know, I think about since the time you joined F5. I mean we've, you know, there was the dot-com crash, there was the down turn in 0708. So you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a dot-com about to crash happening. And the big issue for F5 was, it was actually 90% dot-com business. So the revenue collapsed completely. The stock price dropped from today's price from $21 to a dollar and a half. You know, we've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase, you really have to, you know, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P&L and the profit and loss and the balance sheet and good shape, then we moved into what I would call stability, it's the stability phase. And the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture or product. We knew it was going to take a couple of years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment. You're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective. And we did that. And I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture. Boom, we jumped into the growth mode. 50% growth, not quite as much as new standings today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different. That's an inspirational world. You know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, it's, you know, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus, you know, what's happening kind of, you know, locally and globally for a kind of economic standpoint. I know, you know, I talked to D'Rodge many times, kind of leading up to the IPO. And it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces. So, you know, we're building for the long-term and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, to kind of balance some of those things? Yeah, I mean, the best example is 2008. 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis. And as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, five, six, seven. Interest enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition and then along came the financial crisis. And it was pretty mind-boggling in the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And we went, at first, we thought, oh my God, this is just us. And of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009, you realize it's not you. So, we didn't ignore it, to be honest. We didn't ignore it, but what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring. And in fact, I wish we hadn't done that. I wish we'd have completely ignored it. And the reason, and of course, this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we hadn't even ignored it and kept growing was only six months after moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business start to grow again, but it accelerated because there was a demand that had built up during that time. So, bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know is your business, especially if you know you've got a good market. You know there's a demand and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor since before the IPO? I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO and Nutanix pre-IPO and also AppTool, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So, of course, Dirage tries to say look, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but it has to be a little bit different when you've got the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second-guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? My advice on this is, and it is somewhat different. To say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct. However, you can't let Wall Street run your business. You can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business is all about, when I was asked about do you think you could be acquired? The answer's always been from me the following. We're focused on the business. We're focused on growing a company. When you do that, you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high and you keep going. If your market cap drops, it's worth the stock price, there's always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both those messages are win-wins for investors. Yeah. Absolutely. What can you say about Nutanix? Year after an IPO, 2,800 employees pushing globally. This show's doubled in attendance from last year without getting into closed doors things. What's your take on Nutanix? Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly fast growing company and a great market, a leader in the hyper-convergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in a really good position. Yeah, what in the market is interesting these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, data is becoming more and more valuable. And I spent many years working for a large storage company. Used to be, wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing. And now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out. We're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, data in particular, the clouds. I'm not going to give you anything new here and security, they're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot, are they not? They're all linked together. Yeah, we just interviewed a gentleman from a bank and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you is the kind of, the geopolitical, that hackers in ransomware, security, I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today it absolutely comes to the front of mind. And most companies I talk to are concerned would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. Absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now. Boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. Every company is vulnerable and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. Yeah, how often is security a board level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost everyone now, it is. Yeah, what has to happen there? Making sure that there's been, it's being looked at properly by the executives that they take it seriously, there's enough investment. You know, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Yeah. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversation. No, I haven't been involved in that. I mean, I know there's a breakout session on it today but I've not been involved in that. Yeah, it just reminds me a similar thing is people have said you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks and frankly, most companies have got solutions, security solutions from so many different vendors in some times from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done the cube in Scotland and it's a beautiful country, so we got to figure out how to do some small event there. Yeah, I'll help you. All right, John, want to give you the final word. Your take, you come to, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board but you probably have some meetings but talk to us about a show like this. What brings you? Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and a similar with Aptio as well. So I like to do, it's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers. So it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McCatham, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching The Cube.