 Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE covering Nutanix.next 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier, and we are kicking off a two-day show here in Anaheim. I'm so happy to be working with you, John. Awesome to see you. Great event. It's Nutanix, a hot, innovative company under a lot of pressure from VMware, but this marketplace is changing. Great transition opportunity for these guys, so it's going to be fun. Exactly, and I really want to get into what we heard on the main stage. We had Dheeraj Pandey up there talking about Nutanix. It is a very poignant moment for him because Nutanix is turning 10 this year. That is a milestone in and of itself. This company has really changed so much. It's always been about simplifying data management, but it's no longer a one-product company. I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit on the changes you've seen. It's been a fun ride. I've known Dheeraj for 10 years when we first interviewed him. When they were misunderstood, no one really got what this HCI was going on. Stu Miniman was early to see it at Iban, but it was for a few years. I was like, oh, he's crazy entrepreneur, but he ended up having the right formula. Very innovative company. They've got great product leadership, great engineering, but 10 years old, they went public, so they're out in the open. Dell Technologies went private, reset everything, then went public, kind of forced to go public, and I was doing great. So you have an interesting dynamic. The company's 10 years old, they went public, and they got to make all these moves out in the open. So the interesting thing at 10 years old for them is that they got a great business, and the market's in transition. Hyperconvergence, HCI as it's called, is a solid foundation, but it's changing very radically with cloud technologies and multi-cloud, and the enterprises morphing into, right into their wheelhouse, where there's simplicity needed, there's integration needed, all these new opportunities are emerging, and they're still small, so they can be nimble. This is the challenge that they have, they have to get out in front of this next wave, if they don't, there's going to be competitive pressure. And I think that's the big story that I'm seeing here is, they're 10 years old, they're not resting on their laurels, the CEO's aggressive, he's taken on VMware a little bit, and so, he's competitive, so we'll see what happens. And you said DeRaj is a friend of theCUBE, so let's talk about his leadership style. So here's this company that was a tech startup, it now has a market cap in the multiple billions of dollars, recently gone public. How would you describe his leadership style, and also how it's changed what, since it was sort of a little tech startup? Well, DeRaj has always been an innovator, he's been a visionary. Again, he's a typical founder, he's got the 20-mile stair, as I call it, you can see around the corner, but that's not going to get him through this competitive battle. He's got to balance the visionary competitiveness and strategy with tactical execution. They need to execute right now because they are under a lot of pressure, competitive pressure, they need to increase their sales inside the enterprise, take, get new logos and new customers. So I think what I'm seeing from his leadership style is it's a call to arms within the company saying, we got to go take territory down, we got to compete, not necessarily on a head-on with, say, VMware and others, but they got to continue to innovate and be competitive. That's very tactical, and that's something that came out of the analyst meeting yesterday that I noticed was, he's very tactical, usually he's painting the picture, but he's got a great vision and I think that's going to be the challenge. I want to talk about partners. Who are sort of the key partners that you think will help this company grow? Because it does take a village. Well, the interesting strategy that Nutanix is looking at, in my opinion, this is in my opinion, but they have a partnering strategy, Dell Technologies and VMware is all part of a portfolio of end-to-end strategy, so really the big competitor for Nutanix is going to be Dell, Dell Technologies and their family of companies. Nutanix is going after more of a partnering strategy. They announced a key partnership with Eulip Packard Enterprise, HPE, who's also a competitor in the HCI space. So they got to create this ecosystem strategy and it's going to be about partners and if Nutanix can integrate with other players, they can be a supplier of IT technology for the broader market. This is something that's interesting. Everyone's trying to be a broker or they use the term gateway to the multi-cloud or cloud broker and all these terms have been kicked around but Nutanix truly has an opportunity to take their product leadership and be a partner and tie things together more elegantly than say one company end-to-end. Let's talk also about Nutanix the business. As you've said multiple times, this is a hugely competitive industry. This company is under a lot of pressure. Technically they've got to be tough but yet they've also, they're still small, they can be nimble and innovative. What is sort of on Dirage's to-do list from you speaking as an analyst? Well I think the number one thing I think he's got to really kind of show up the sales and marketing effort of it because they have, when they compete in the marketplace they need more competitive wins. The stock has taken a little bit hit lately on just some basic fundamentals. Again, I still think they're misunderstood in the market and that's a big upside for Nutanix but they got to win more competitive deals. Where they compete with a proof of concept also known as a POC, they win most of the time. They got to take their product leadership and they got to win in the field. This is a critical thing and lower their cost of acquisition for customers. That's a key kind of financial analysis. The other thing that they got to do is continue to get the product leadership and get positions for that next wave. That's going to be enterprise and multi-cloud and that's not yet clear and the numbers don't look that strong in my opinion on the growth. It's no one's really got visibility into what those numbers going to look like. In their core business, their HCI business, they're solid. So they got to build on that, extend out that base and that's really the core strategy. How would you describe the customer mindset? Because as you said, this is a company that's misunderstood, they get it and they're sort of waiting for the customers to catch up or waiting for the market really to catch up. The customer angle is interesting because a lot of people that like Nutanix are coming from VMware where they pay licenses and VMware had some misfires and a couple of years ago on product, they kind of caught back up and shore that up but that opened up a door for Nutanix. VMware 6.0 has been talked about as one of those gaps where opened up the door to Nutanix. So VMware customers are kind of looking at Nutanix. I think the HPE relationship is interesting because I think that's going to be a whole new set of customer base. But the customer mindset right now is interesting. They want to not consolidate, they want to actually reduce the pain points around dealing with all this legacy hardware, legacy software, and I think Nutanix's position to come in and say, we can provide an integrated solution, reduce your footprint, give you more capabilities and free up the time it takes to manage IT. And I think that's one of the consistent themes. The other notable thing I noticed about their customer base is it's a lot younger and smarter technical people where they don't have that dogma of this is the way we used to do it. And I think that's going to be an interesting DevOps opportunity where the younger generation in IT would be like, why are we doing this versus this? I think that's going to be very interesting to see if that network effect for Nutanix will work. Well, I'm interested to hear you talk about this younger generation in relation to the customers because Nutanix is also a younger gen, it's 10 years old, it's sort of on the verge of adolescence. And we were just at Dell EMC World. That company is turning 35 next week. Obviously, Microsoft and Apple are well into their 40s. How would you talk about this company in terms of it as part of the new generation of tech companies? Tech powerhouses, really. Well, I mean, I think it's a contrast between two styles, Michael Dell is awesome. And what he's putting out there is an end-to-end strategy for Dell. They want to automate, they want to own the infrastructure layer, they want to be the preferred supplier for IT. Nutanix is a little bit different. They're younger, they're faster, they're nimble. And they're taking a more integrated approach and a partnership-centric approach. So I think the style is one of Achita, who's running fast, that's Nutanix. And then the big elephant, which is Dell, and they're just pounding through the territory, the Dell technologies in VMware have more muscle. So they're going to have some good wins there. Nutanix has got to stay fast and nimble and kind of just bobbin-weave off of what Dell's doing. So I think that's the opportunity for them is to go to the next level. And I think D-Rage sees that. The question I see is that, because they're a public company, they got to balance this all out in the open. And they're very transparent companies, so I don't think it's going to be too hard of a challenge, but this is what they have to do. They got to really take that revenue up in the cloud and enterprise beyond HCI. And Wall Street is watching. Yeah, Wall Street's watching. So we have a great show we have. We're going to be talking products, we're going to be talking women in tech, social impacts, research. For our viewers at home, what do you think that they should be looking for in terms of Nutanix and its journey? I think that what I would look for and what I'm going to be poking out on the interviews is, what's next? Because I think this is a critical bet for D-Rage and the team was, are they on the right wave? Is this what the customers want? What kind of product leadership they have? And then what's the culture fit for what the customers want? And the customers are looking for simplicity. They want to reduce their cost of ownership and they want to supply that's going to be around. So I think the key thing is look for where it goes next. That's where I think the number one thing to look for. Well, John, I'm looking forward to two days of coverage with you. Yeah, cool. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix next here in Anaheim, California. Stay with us.