 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of re-invent 2020 virtuals. Three weeks we're here covering all the action virtually. It's theCUBE virtual. Normally we're in person. This year we're remote, it's theCUBE virtual. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm pleased to have a great guest here, Madhukar Kumar, who's the VP of Product Marketing Nutanix. The tons of deep coverage on Nutanix over the years. We've followed this company since its inception, almost over, just over 10 years ago. Madhukar, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on today. Nice to be here, John. We're part of the APN Partner Experience Programming within re-invent as a big day here. You guys are a big part of it. You have such a great partnership with AWS. You have product on AWS, which is a high distinction in the spirit of their partnership technology-wise. Can you tell us real quick, a quick update on the partnership with AWS? What is it? How's it going? What's new? So I think about it. We had a dot next, John. And as part of that, we announced something called Nutanix clusters. And as part of that cluster, that's our hybrid solution. Basically, what we are seeing is we have a lot of customers who certainly had to take years or maybe even months of digital transformation. And then all of a sudden, they have to now figure out, how do I go to an elastic workload in a few weeks? So we were seeing a lot of our customers coming to us and saying, hey, we really need help with this. We no longer are in a situation where we have to go and buy a server and rack and stack that and then manage all of that over a period of month. We really need to do something in few weeks. And when we do that, we need some tools that we are really familiar with and something that can help us get to cloud as quickly as possible. So we were seeing this a lot even before the macro conditions. So sometime around August, we as part of our annual conference, we did announce a partnership with AWS where now you can run an entire Nutanix cluster with all of its products on AWS bare metal as well. And that's the hybrid solution that we're talking about, John today. That's awesome. And in line with the major themes and waves from the announcements from Andy Jassy and the slew of kind of higher level services because the COVID pandemic really highlights this digital transformation of cloud bursting to deploying quicker in the cloud, being more agile and having speed to value because you need it, because the world's changed. But it's also highlighted, and this is a key theme I want to get your reaction to is the hybrid cloud. I mean, it's been out there, we saw outpost two years ago and it's been kind of filling in. And now the environment is clear, right? The enterprises are saying, I have to operate on premises and in the cloud the same kind of way, but I'm going to do different things. It's not just lift and shift, throw in the cloud. That's been there, done that. It's different now. It's an operating model. It's an environment, two different environments operating the same, your reaction. That's exactly right. In fact, what we are seeing is from an IT perspective, the new reality is multiple environments. And those environments, it could be your, of course, your private data center. It could be your public cloud. Sometimes it could even be the edge and so on. And every time what we see is, if you don't have the portability of your workload, you have to kind of redo a whole bunch of things. You have to refactor your applications. You have to go maybe even reskill your entire workforce. And so there's a lot of overhead involved whenever portability is involved. And the new reality is that you have to have portability, which is the reason why we see even with Kubernetes taking such a strong hold in a lot of these organizations. So we've been seeing a bunch of different use cases come to us as well. Some customers saying, hey, that's great that we have all of these multiple tools, but I want consistency. I want consistency in the constructs of the way I manage my IT. If I'm managing some workload in a different way on-prem, I want to maintain that also in public cloud. How do I do that? So Clusters really tries to address that gap. In fact, another story I will tell you, John, is that disaster recovery is one of those use cases that we have seen quite a lot in these conditions as well. We had one customer come to us based in Oregon and they had, of course, you've heard about the fires over there and they did not really have a disaster recovery plan. So what do you do in situations like that? You have to rely on cloud. So within four hours, we were able to help them to take, you know, their entire infrastructure and have a recovery plan directly into the cloud. So we are seeing a lot of use cases like that too. You know, that's interesting. The DR, the recovery is a great, one of many use cases, but it highlights the pandemic surge of the change, right? The sea change, it's so fast. Okay, yeah, disaster recovery, working in cloud, great solution, but because of the personnel challenges, it also works well too. So this is the theme, you know, personnel may or may not be available. I got to get to the cloud. I got to have everything software run. Everything's being run by software. So this kind of brings up my favorite topic, which is a big part of this year's event, which is architecture and edge. And you're starting to see, not to pat myself on the back, but I kind of predicted it a couple of years ago that there is no edge if it's cloud, right? It's cloud, problem of cloud, you got on-premise edge. Data center is a big edge. I mean, it's all the one thing, right? So edge is big now, right? And now people working at home, it's an edge, and it highlights all the security issues. So how do you operate that seamlessly? This is a huge challenge. Your thoughts? Yeah, of course. I think what you touched upon is a massive shift that we have seen over the years, as you said, right? Even if you look at things like Telco, for example, first there was a massive shift from hardware, specialized hardware to virtualized network functions, for example, which were virtual machines. And I think we are seeing a bigger shift also now, where virtual machines are now moving over to containers. And because these are all microservices and very tiny, so to speak, you can run it anywhere and hopefully in commodity hardware. So throughout the years, if you look at, if you followed Nutanix, we have followed the path where we started off with hyperconversion infrastructure and that was virtualizing your entire data center stack. So you could take storage network compute and now it's completely software defined or virtualized, whatever you want to call it, you can run it on any commodity hardware or hardware of your choice. What we see now is that we want to apply that same principle of being able to write once and run anywhere and be agnostic to the underlying layers, even for cloud. So just as you could take and run your entire Nutanix platform and create virtual machines and containers on an HPE or a Dell box, you can now also take that and also run it on public cloud, for example. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I want to just, that's the first, that's a great point for spending your mission from day one. But I want to ask you if you don't mind, on the edge, one topic that's come up a lot this week, and we've been reporting on this before we invent, I think at VMworld that came up a few months ago. Purpose-built edge devices in the old days were purpose-built. They were purpose-built with up and down the stack from hardware, supply chain, all the way to software. But what you're kind of getting at is kind of this new use case where you can have a purpose-built edge device whether it's a wearable or machine or sensors or whatever machines and still run software on there. Trusted software, software-defined. This is a key point. Can you unpack that this piece? Because I think this is kind of where the rubber meets the road because if you can be software-operated, you can go to that device. It can still be purpose-built. It can still function with software. That's exactly right. So if you think about it at the end of the day, if you're running some sort of an application or a workload, I always say you need compute. You need storage and you need networking. And we started off with physical hardware then with virtual machines and now with containers. But at the containers level or at the virtual machine level, the application doesn't really care about the underlying pieces, right? And that's been our principle when we created the entire Nutanix stack and virtualized everything. So within Nutanix stack, you could take, we have our own hypervisor, but we also support others as well. So you can create virtual machines, you can create containers, you can have storage network. And now because we are agnostic, you can actually run it on hardware of your choice or an environment of your choice. What's more important though here is that, the same set of tools that you use to manage your data center is now also available to you to be able to manage it on other environments too. In this case, it's AWS or if you decide to run it in any other environment, it would be the exact same construct, the exact same automation scripts. And that really is what seamless really means. Matt Cougar, thanks for coming on and sharing that insight. I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up here. If you could tease out the most important feature or benefit or technology solution of the Nutanix on AWS because yeah, and reinvent, there's a lot of sessions people can go to. You guys have your own Build Your Workshop, Build Your Own Hybrid Cloud Workshop. People should check that out. But you know, you're in product marketing. Your job is to figure out what people really love the most about it. So, you know, here at Reinvent this week, what's the most important thing? What should people pay attention to with Nutanix and AWS? Yeah, I think it's for us, I see myself as a developer still or a technical person. And for me, what really excites me about clusters is the freedom of choice. I can choose to run it on the environment of my choice. In this case, it's AWS. But there are some in-built cost benefit features that's in there. You know, as you know, if you create something in the cloud, you don't necessarily think of cloud or cost. You create something that runs all the time, but you often have to worry about, hey, how much is going to cost this? So one of the things that we did write as part of clusters is a hibernate feature. And what it allows you to do is that when you're not using clusters, you just like your laptop, you close the screen, you hit the hibernate button, and it takes the entire state of your cluster and saves it on an S3 bucket. And when you're ready to then reignite it, you just hit the resume button. So when you're not using it using the true fundamentals of cloud, you are actually saving costs. That's one of the things I think is something that will really excite a lot of IT folks like me. Well, you know, being technical, being on the right wave, software defined, software operated infrastructure, automation, speed, consistency, multiple environments operating consistently. This is the holy grails, what we want, and you guys are doing it. Congratulations, and have a good conference. Thanks for coming. All right, thanks. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020. Three weeks we're here virtually, this is theCUBE, we are theCUBE virtual. Sean Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.