 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 theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Nice. Happy to welcome back to the program, Sunil Poti, fresh off the keynote here. 2200 in attendance here at the second annual European show. Sunil's the chief product and development officer. And, Sunil, your team's been busy. You know, product development, you know, five dot five, ton of new features, in development, a lot of things going on. So, let's step back for a second, though. And, you know, it's a year after the IPO. You know, I watched the Wall Street guys, they're all like, wait, are they boxes, or are they software, you know, are they infrastructure, are they cloud? You know, you kind of step back, it's, you know, I liked it, it was, you know, the simplicity takes real genius, and then you're like, to try to appeal to the European cloud, it was more T, less clicks. So, you know, what's the kind of, is people think of Nutanix, when do we think of you, why do we think of you? Got you, got you. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of moving parts there, but I think our core TCs hasn't changed from where it was, even pre-IPO, post-IPO, multiple conferences. I think the core thesis, as you know, is that we fundamentally think folks talk about hybrid cloud, hybrid cloud, the first step is we know public clouds exist, true private clouds haven't been built yet, and they have to be first standardized, commoditized, and then harmonized with the public cloud. So, I think, from our perspective, the core thesis of the fact that if you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there'll be a ton of workloads that stay inside. But with the right experience for the right costs, right? And essentially, that journey hasn't veiled from our perspective, right? So we're still on that. Yeah, absolutely. At Wikibon, we said, you know, cloud isn't a destination, it's really more of an operational model. So, you know, we can capture that, you say true private cloud, we said, we're starting to get there, and we actually, we credit Nutanix, so you know, of course the messaging of Enterprise Cloud was probably a little bit aspirational at the beginning, but you're filling in the pieces, you've got the partnerships, you've got the products rolling out. So, you know, let's talk about your bread and butter, as to, you know, what's new, what's launching now. I like to hear, you know, as a software company, it's, you show a little bit more, but you know, here's, when we test some things out, it's that balance of, for the Enterprise, it's like, wait, are you going to, is this going to work the way I think it is? You put stuff out, like the community edition first, let people play with it, and then you GA it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think we talked a little bit about it. Essentially, rather than me list out a whole series of functionality, I think, you know, the way we are also looking at it, as well as building it, as well as rolling it out, is in the form of what a customer can consume. So we are investing in Nutanix-like capabilities across the life cycle, right? So we have, you know, we're investing in ensuring that community edition gets a lot more emphasis, because we think this paradigm of one-click data centers is something that people need the ubiquity to kind of play around with, right? So you'll see community edition from a learning side, then we're looking for capabilities for people to actually say, look and compare, look, Nutanix is one architecture, BX-ray is another architecture, three tiers another architecture, maybe public cloud, and at some point in time, people need the flexibility to actually have, in the old world of TPC benchmarks, the new world of what I would call production benchmarks, right? So we add, you know, a whole bunch of tools such as X-ray coming out, then rather than leave it to professional services and so forth, rather than just worry about reducing the number of clicks, once you have Nutanix, even before you get to Nutanix, how do you reduce the number of clicks to get to Nutanix, right? That's where, you know, Extract, which is a very popular tool for us. Again, that has been shipping for a month, for now, where you can actually click at a certain VMware environment, a certain database environment, and essentially, literally, without a whole bunch of lift and shift, move into a private cloud environment, right? And Extract is, I could take my VMs really from VMware to an HV environment, and it also works on databases as well, like SQL databases and so forth, right? Yeah, absolutely. That migration is something that, you know, it's like a four-letter word for most people in IT. One of the things that we were early on kind of beating the drum on is traditional three-tier architectures with storage. Your migration cost was at least 30% of the total cost of ownership, because you had to bring data on, eventually you had to take data off, as opposed to if they really have more like a pool, which is what HCI does. You know, that first, once I get onto it, that's the last time you need to do a migration, because now, I can move and add, remove nodes, and then we just kind of manage it there. Absolutely, you know, it's, the other company I hear talking a lot about this thing is Amazon, you know, they've been working on the database migrations, lots of companies, you know, changing way their environment, and you know, it's something that customers are looking at. And it's almost like for us, with the public cloud, at least you have a genuine sort of big hop and lift and shift, you know, just because of the boundaries. It's a shame if we can't solve that problem without what we call make lift and shift invisible inside the data center, at least, right? So that's why we've invested in things like extract, so that people can, look, we're still less than 1% of the market. So we expect a whole lot of migration to happen over the next few years. So anything that we can do to kind of accelerate customers to the point of ensuring that their architectural integrity is preserved with the Nutanix-like environment, I think it's a big focus for us. So you're going to see us emphasize extract, not just for, therefore, for VMs or databases to Nutanix on-prem, but you're also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility. Because imagine Calm as a construct that you're able to go in, provision workloads, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, but at some point in time, you want to move them back and forth. You know, the thing that we used to always say, app mobility, it's slowly coming to fruition with some of these constructs. Yeah, and Calm's a centerpiece of really your multi-cloud strategy. Talked to, you know, some customers, some of the early folks, pretty excited about it. A lot of the others have been like, okay, well, I've seen some slides in a demo, kind of squintin' looking at it. Reminds me of the early days. Well, I bet it can't really do what they say it does. So I think they've tasted the wine. You know what I mean? Just like everything else. I think there were a bunch of early believers who saw the product, you used the product, which we used as an early access program. But we took a step back when we acquired the Comma year ago, we had the choice of releasing a reasonably big product to Main Street. They had spent seven years building that product. They had read it in two times. So they had already done a read out or two. But we took the time to ensure that it was burned into the Nutanix fabric, right? It had to fit into Prism. It had to fit into our Lifecycle Manager. It had to fit into our one click upgrade. You know, it needs to look and feel like a natural extension, versus a power-sucking alien, right? Which is what we've seen with many of our competitors products, where you just buy some things and you put it in there. And the more successful it is, the harder it is to homogenize, right? So we took our time and that's what you're going to see in 5.5. I think customers can now actually genuinely use the product. On day one, it'll have AHV support, AWS support. Very quickly it'll have ESX and GCP and Azure. And it's a separate code train, by the way, in the sense that the same code base, but it's being delivered as a service. And you're going to see more and more of that paradigm where Nutanix is no longer going to be this blob of capabilities that in itself comes out fast, but there's a bunch of microservices now that are going to be released, not just on the cloud, but also on-prem. So AFS is a good example. Extract is a good example. Calm is a good example. And now with 5.5, even Prism Central is going to be detached so that you can consume that at a different velocity than the core. Yeah, how do you make sure you balance that with the simplicity that really is a core piece of your business proposition? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is where we just have to be measured in ensuring that it's still one single code base, for example. Well, we can't afford to have like 18 different branches, right? So simple things like that actually go a long way to make sure that somebody can still go to a console and say upgrade, it checks the right revisions. It's a little bit invisible, sort of like the version mismatch and all of that is our problem, not a customer problem, right? Yeah, absolutely. All right, so lot in 5.5, which we haven't touched there, but also really unveiling some of the kind of the next step in the journey, what you're working on for the next six months. Yeah. What's the focus there? Cloud is, I think you talked about, invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. So it looks like kind of expanding out and building out some of those cloud services. Take us through some of that. So I think the general team is continue to fulfill our ambition around making infrastructure more invisible. And then at the same time in parallel, try to make clouds invisible. And I'll break it down into three kinds of products, capabilities, right? The first one is we still have a journey, things got out to actually fulfill what I would call the A block, the Amazon-like block for the enterprise. And you can call it the Azure block, you can call it the Alphabet block, now that we support multiple clouds. But the point being that, simple things such as look, we've done a great job of compute storage and visualization. What about networking, right? And we've always said, look, the problem is not in the data plan of networking, top of the rack switches are pretty commodity, they work, I just, okay, whatever you name it. The issue is always in the control plan. When something goes wrong, what do you do? So that's one of the big things coming in 5.5, is built-in network visualization, provisioning, and one-click microsegmentation. And again, the point being, rather than by very expensive products such as NSX or some other overlay products where you're virtualizing the network to secure the network. If you go to Amazon, you go to Google, you go to Azure, not only do they not require you to virtualize, the way that microsegmentation is built is genuinely with the simplicity of one click. You take 10 VMs, put it in a security group, you're off to the races, right? And the same paradigm basically moves to us. So in that vein of fulfilling that stack is one dimension and a couple of key things that are new there that are in the, if I can call it the next six months timeframe, not in 5.5, is the fact that, well, with everything said and done, we've got file services, we've got blocks, we've got containers, everything else, but what about object storage? Sounds obvious, right? So we've taken our time to kind of build a next-generation object storage service, not a first-generation one, that can scale obviously to the levels of web scale that these days customers want, but it's deployed with Gen2 requirements. An example of a Gen2 requirement is you can't build an object storage service that is simply on-prem or simply off-prem anymore, right? It has to be hybrid from day one. My primary needs to be data locality, quote-unquote has to be invisible under the cover, so my primary stuff is closer to my compute, whereas my secondary and backup can be moved out into the cloud. And the same thing applies on even something much more simpler, which is EC2. What about EC2 for the enterprise, right? And that's where I think we were inspired to actually go build this Acropolis compute cloud, AC2, which essentially says you can take my Neutronics cluster, compute storage and all that, but then only have compute-only nodes, and you could have SAP HANA with scale-up requirements, you could have IBM Power, you could have Oracle running on those, but they're essentially being managed with that single pane of glasses. So this is the first time where you're seeing, based on a customer demand, now AHE is now almost one out of three nodes being shipped, is an AHE node. We've come a long way in the last two years, right? So people covered that simple virtualization, especially if you can be extended from a compute-only fabric to the hyperconverter fabric. So I think that's one dimension, which is, it is interesting, just happenstance that in the news recently, Amazon just announced that they're switching from Zen to KVM-based, so similar. Come on, you couldn't get Amazon to just sign on for AHE. No, see, I think what it is, is that frankly AHE, again, from our perspective, was all about just ruggedizing KVM, right? To make it, you know, storage, IOPS work well, the management plane work well, and in fact, the fact that AWS is doing that actually is a good sign for us to go deeper with them, frankly, just as a tangent is, rather than just go deeper with, say, a XI or with GCP and so forth, just natively as well now, with CIFI instances, there's an opportunity for Nutanix Fabric to kind of seamlessly leverage that because the core constructs are similar with KVM, right? So you're going to see some interesting stuff come up there, maybe that's for the next cube, for the next conference. Cineo, it's interesting, I've had a chance to talk to a few customers already, and we talk about kind of that cloud, you know, everything from, you know, the Germans that, you know, well, I've got governance and compliance, and you know, I'm not doing public cloud too, you've got a customer speaking today in a session that's like, I'm going to do everything SaaS and what I can't do SaaS, I'll do infrastructure and service, and then there's a little bit of stuff that I can't do because I don't have enough network or things like that, and that's where Nutanix fit for me, you know, making products and dealing with customers on such a broad spectrum is a little challenging. Yeah, it is. And you know, trying to fit where Nutanix is, you know, on that cloud, because right, if they're buying SaaS from a lot of pieces, it's like, well, you're not going to be as critical as it's supposed to somebody that's like, well, hey, my data center is really my temple and you know, you can help there, so. Yeah, I mean, I think the philosophy that we use in terms of our product strategy and roadmap there too, just maybe to give some color on it is, it's the curse of the platform, right, the wealth of the platform, which is like, we are a platform company and we've internalized that. You know, not a simple product company. So a lot of this comes down to what do we not do as well, right, versus what do we just do? And one simple filter that we use is, is it directionally in a secular motion for enterprises or not? So a simple example is, look, a lot of customers, and we would have had probably quite a bit of sales if we simply said, look, I can take my existing Nutanix cluster, I've just bought a three-part array, I've bought a NetApp box, just why don't you guys just coexist with that? But then if you really think about it, it's like AWS coming to you and saying, oh, by the way, take my service environment, put my AWS software on it, right? It's like Apple coming out and saying, here's iOS, run it on BlackBerry, right? So one-click upgrades won't work, right? You know, it's just not the right thing. So there are things like that that we've stayed away from that allows us to, even if we are stretched, lean in on the forward-looking secular motion, such as, look, let's continue to finish the job inside, then harmonize inside and outside, and then go provide specialized services like Zai in addition to what we're doing with GCP or Amazon and others. All right, last question I have for you. What's exciting you in the marketplace today, getting your engineers kind of fired up as kind of this next wave? Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think some of the biggest thing is around how apps are now being re-platformed themselves, not just infrastructure, right? And people use the word pass and all that other stuff, but essentially, I think we're now getting into the golden era or the initial golden era where IAS re-platforming is more or less known. Now, of course it's going to take you five, 10 years to do it, but I don't think people are debating the way to do that. It's no longer open stack inside, it's no longer, you know, hosted clouds and all that crap, right? Through clouds, right? I think that wave has to emerge on the application side as well. You're starting to see some of that with Kubernetes, now becoming a de facto for one sliver of it, but there's so many other services that are up for grabs, right? So I think you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months, and you're going to obviously see Nutanix play a role there, is what does it mean to not hybridize my data center, but what does it mean to hybridize my app? And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity and interesting inspirational stuff there from an innovation perspective that keeps our guys going. Absolutely, well, Sunil, always a pleasure to chat with you, look forward to catching up with you at the next time, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix.next conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.