 from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Camera. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Chris Cadaris. He is the Senior Vice President of Americas at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Well, thanks for having me. Returning to theCUBE, I should say. It did be back. So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I want to hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. Yeah, so it's an interesting journey because I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies, right? So I started here in the Americas, you can tell by my accent. And I spent the last nine years in the AMIA business. And getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world, right? So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're going to get those benefits. So it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past. And they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that. So it's been fun. What accounts for this difference in mindset, would you say? You know, I think it has to do first off with, you know, in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace. And when you get competition, you get pressures that come with that competition, you have to evolve. You have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications and the business needs to evolve that supports that. So that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of, you know, a lot of risk-taking, a lot of transformation, a lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end user business unit. That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture, what's inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk-takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage, Mark Hamill, the Star Wars theme, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic target there, everyone loves Star Wars and tech. But I got to ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers, not like the other big shows. Your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. Can you have a chance to sit down with them while they're here? What's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. You know, I kind of compare our customers to almost like a religious following. I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations, but it's really like that. These customers are bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing, they're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational. Now, what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger. You know, last year we were like 5,000 the year before that, we were another 2,000 less than that, so it's gotten a lot bigger. And our customers are coming back to us and saying, we want you to be a bit more intimate. Okay, so we've had that in the past. We've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to your development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products, as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer, because that's going to give you the true north as to where you need to go. So we're getting that feedback. Some of it's hard, right? Some of it's you're getting too big, you're getting too dispersed, right? You need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey, but that's part of growing up as a company. And you know, that's the reason why we're here, to hear customer feedback. And you guys have that true north. Essentials is the enterprise opportunity, multi-cloud right around the corner, on top of your core business, which is doing great by the way, got great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical, by building on that core. And this product risk, potentially, we talked to Sunil too, is the next waves are coming. So customers kind of want that assurance. So I got to ask you, when you go out there and you sell on the customers, and you tell them that, the Nutanix is the bridge to the future. What's the value proposition? I mean, obviously we touch on the enablement side. Obviously, consolidation is a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that. But what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatness of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? Yeah, I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to our customers to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing, getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build sands and compute farms and how they're going to deal with multiple hypervisors, it's let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple, develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms. So let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at. Let's forget about infrastructure. Let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy. You pick the platform, you're locked into the entire application set, locked into the compute set, you're locked into the storage set, you have no decision around hypervisor and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications. So the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovators dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application. So that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements, how do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? Yeah, it's hard. We're not doing a good job there today. Just we're not. Now, this is a journey of all of these companies like us. How do you go through that eye of the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company? Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult. So I understand what we're doing. What you do is you come up with a lot of different products, a lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize. We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated to the core. All those things are happening. The nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do. Let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more and then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you know, you're fooling yourself, right? So that's our direction today. Well, Chris, you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers in the enterprise, which is great. I mean, you don't have to worry about product leadership, you got it there. As you guys, for you in particular and your customers, you're also transitioning to software. You get the full stack. That's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors. You mentioned that. You know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software, which by the way is great for economics. The economics and valuations on software business are super high. So on the consumption side for customers, this is going to be something that you're going to be involved in. You got to bring Nutanix out to the field. You got to roll it out to the customers. They're going to consume Nutanix with software. How's that going? Can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model? What are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transition to software? Yeah, that's a transition that we started about a year ago. And some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some really plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally. So the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software. And they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be. So they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open. And when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resell partners and all of our GSI partners, it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here. What platform do you want to consume? So that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve. So moving our customers to a term-based licensing model was really important and we've done that in the last year. And then allowing our customers to then consume very easily when you move to those terms. So how do I consume a node of software? How does that work? How do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple. You know, our previous go-to-market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes, it came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model, it comes a little bit more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELA's, right? Where they may want to consume, have more agility around their software licensing mechanism, get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise-priced purchase agreement strategy. I wouldn't call it ELA's because ELA's in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things that other competitors do around true ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to. So we want to work with our customers and partners as to how do you want to buy those and new enterprise purchase agreements moving forward? I want to ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation, you're hearing feedback from customers, you're getting too big. And I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade, rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback, you're getting too big guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's sort of the internal strategy there? Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right? Because I see it as well, right? I've only been in for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now it's, you know, I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, right? So the things that we're going to do are a few things. So we do have a customer advisory board that meets, you know, right now it only meets once a year, right? In certain markets. We need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voice back into what we're doing. We got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week. Big customers that said, you need to think about this, right? And it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, right? We also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right? So our sales reps, our SEs, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day, our support people. Providing that vehicle feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important. So we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today, but it's just not, we're not getting the message through, right? They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're going to start to create and develop that within the company. So growing pains, you got to fix those things, the software model looking good. So things are clicking right now. Net promoter score in the 90s, which is pretty much unheard of. You guys, great loyal customer base. Good news there? Yeah, I mean, great news. I mean, we're probably, we're talking about, you know, first world problems here, right? It's about, you know, we have a huge market. The market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how do we take our fair share and more of that marketplace? So these are the, you know, discussions that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world, right, in any other company. You're Chris, you're in sales, you're running on the field. Sales, you guys had a humble culture with a heart, as DeRouge talks about, you got to be aggressive, you got to be competitive, and you got to go win those deals. Got to win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. Yeah, and it's really, you know, from our perspective, it's turned into a bit of a two horse race at this point in time, right? We think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace, right? For customers who want flexibility and choice, I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time, right? Our competitors are strong, right? And they're good, they're good people, they work hard, they do, you know, have great people and great technologies. You know, our entire value proposition around how to provide customer flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in the future. And I think if we do that, then we'll be in a good place. Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years is knowing the competition, who could outmuscle you if you were, if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just to be faster and innovate. Yeah, I mean, I think we're doing that on technology, we're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean, coming out with amazing products, right? Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid-market company to an enterprise company to a global account company, these things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, right? It's a scaling problem, right? And, you know, those are things that we can easily do, right? I'm happy to do those. And those are things that we, you know, are hiring new people that help us through that journey. And it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of results, positive results for our customers. Exciting times. Well, Chris Kaderis, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE.