 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next. We are here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, the analyst for theCUBE. We have two guests for this segment. We have Manoj Agarwal. He is the SVP engineering at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you very much. And Gil Haberman. He is the senior director product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So our topic today is XI clusters. These were announced in Anaheim, at .next back in Anaheim. Gil, why don't we start with you and describe the business problems you were hearing from customers and how these XI clusters are designed to help solve them. Sure, first, thanks for inviting me, big fan of theCUBE. It's great to be here. To your question, at Nutanix, we've been working with customers on the vision of hybrid cloud for a number of years now. And the different challenges have evolved over time. Initially, there were pockets of public cloud adoption where customers wanted to simply find a way to operate across multiple clouds. But today, the challenges are different. Now, as customers are looking to adopt business critical applications that span private and public bursting and migrating applications, there's a strong need for consistency across environments. And we hear around consistency around three aspects. The first is infrastructure. The second is operations. And the third is the consumption model itself. From an infrastructure perspective, what we keep hearing is that the same VMs and applications must be able to work across environments without significant replatforming or retooling. From an operations perspective, cloud engineers truly need a way to utilize the same practices, integrations, and work that they've done on their applications for many years across multiple clouds. So there's a need to sustain the same practices across these multiple clouds. And finally, from a consumption model perspective, there's a need to have a platform that drives the same level of consistency in terms of licensing and software across different environments. And for that, we at Nutanix have to evolve to empower operators to be able to address all these needs of consistency across private and public. Yeah, I would like to add something to it. If you just think about three years ago, the entire world was talking about everything is going to be public cloud. And very soon, all these CIOs also realize that it's not going to be just public cloud or just private cloud, it's going to be hybrid. And we ran a survey with 2700 IT professionals who participated in the survey. And overwhelmingly, like 91% of them, they said hybrid is ideal. And the second thing that was not also a surprising thing was 94% of them, they said the app migration or app mobility is going to be the key. And then we look at the adoption, like how are you adopting or going to adopt? And that was also strikingly similar, like what we see currently maybe 18% or so, that they are into the hybrid world and getting onto the close to 41% or so in the next 24 months. Yeah, Manoj, I'm glad you brought that up. When I talk to users, the thing that they're concerned most about is their applications and their data. And in IT forever, migrations have been a challenging thing to do. And it was usually you set up a migration and it takes you weeks or months to do it. Today, we know migrations aren't going to even be a one-time thing if I'm moving from one cloud to another, if I'm moving from private to public or even public to private. I need to have some flexibility into what I'm building. How has that informed, you know, how you're building your architectural designs? That's a great point. In fact, and we always feel that architecture matters and why the fundamental technologies that we are building, that should help. Two things that I will say, one is the data replication technologies that we have built and strengthened over time. Plus, the second thing is the network. Like, if you get the network right, then you have great story there. And we had been, definitely on the data side, you know, 10 years of journey and data replication technologies that we have built. Networking, we had been very hard at work on that front also in the last three years or so with the building of Xi Cloud. And you'll see and you'll hear more and more, especially in the context of Xi cluster, what you see is that we have done the native integration with AWS VPCs, thereby, first of all, all of the services that exist in AWS is just available to the customers with their app running on Xi clusters without changing anything there. This is a competitive market. So let's talk about differentiation. How do you see the product as completely different from your rivals, and then how are you positioning it to your customers? Yeah, I'll go back to, again, the same thing. Architecture matters. We were not the first one to go out with the hyperconverts like in 2013. There was a lot of other competitive solutions that existed at the time. But we took our time. We wanted to make sure that we do it right. We do provide choice to our customers. Like, that's what will matter. As we are building our solutions, first, like, again, going back to the core principle, applications shouldn't require a change. You don't require IT operations to change. So when we are building this solution, we are making sure if you have, you want to pick private cloud on-prem or service provider, or you want a public cloud, any of the big cloud players or regional cloud that you have a common architecture underneath. You have the same management plan with the Prism from where you can really orchestrate, you can manage the entire infrastructure. You have the flexibility in terms of the networking, other services that you want to go and use. You have the choice of the virtualization platform also, like something that we don't want you to go and change if you don't need a change. And lastly, I would say on the business side, like, we do want to give in this multi-cloud world the flexibility for the customers to bring a cloud of their choice. And when they want to switch, they should be able to switch with one click also. You know, Gil, I'm wondering if you can actually explain to our audience, you know, one of the challenges here is just deploying on bare metal is not something that, you know, anybody can just do on the public cloud. For AWS, it was the first solution was actually VMware on AWS, they had to develop that, but they're now opening that to be able to use, can you walk us through where we are with the cloud providers? And that's, I think, part of the reason why this isn't yet generally available. Yes, indeed, AWS has been the first to open bare metal. And this is really the path for us at Nutanix to make clouds invisible as well. So we worked with a number of platforms on-prem and now we want to extend that to public cloud and having an ability to actually access bare metal is the first step in doing so. Beyond that, what we've done was, what we believe is the hard work of making things very simple to drive customer delight. And so what we've done was integrate into AWS rather than just running on top of AWS, inside existing accounts and VPCs of customers and the outcome has benefits on both technology and business perspective. From technology perspective, cloud operators can see all bare metal as well as cloud native services in one place, one inventory. And we believe that this type of topology would also provide better performance. And then on the business side, this allows us to do a couple of things. The first, if you are an AWS users, like most of our customers, they can use AWS credits for that bare metal infrastructure. And at Nutanix, we're now able to evolve our services to provide hybrid licenses. So our licenses will eventually be portable. And so you see how we are gradually building towards this portability across multiple clouds, AWS being the first cloud. Yeah, it's actually, so it's great to see Nutanix. We've seen a few other companies moving towards that model because right, if I'm software and truly agnostic, you should be able to have it across those environments. I believe SolidFire a couple of years ago started doing some of the things, a couple other companies. So the X in AWS sounds like it will be first. We know Google has been a partner of Nutanix for a while. Can you just give us, where are we with Google and Azure kind of to round out the big three? Sure, so we have started the work with AWS and we have announced early access, now inviting customers to sign up with us to get access. We are also actively working with Azure to figure out how to together bring better bare metal services and Nutanix software on top of that. And of course we believe that other cloud vendors are going to open this up as well. And Google Cloud being a close partner of ours is an important part of that strategy as well. And we are doing something with Google already, as you know. We have integrated like the entire stack using their nested virtualization technologies, like running on their virtualization, which is nested. And today, actually we run a lot of our customers prospect, they run, they test or experience the entire solution on Google Test Drive that we have brought out more than 1000 users every month that they access it. So it's a journey, like when they have the bare metal, like full bare metal, you can see a lot more, but we are very engaged with them this journey. I want to talk about the future now. And have you looked into your crystal ball a bit five, 10 years from now. What do you see, this is such a fast changing environment, but how do you see the cloud evolving and then how do you see Nutanix, what role does Nutanix play? Last 10 years, you know it was all about how we bring public cloud into the private cloud, right? And next five to 10 years when you think about it, it's all going to be about how do we really make it hybrid, the experience that what customer come to expect, like in the last 10 years, like you can go and pick any kind of platform on which you want to run the same stack, you don't need to worry about it, something similar that needs to happen. And the underneath, like the underlying architecture technologies which will go and drive that is going to the data mobility same control plane that can go and extend this multiple cloud. And this story, by the way, it resonates very, very well with the customers because it's not easy to get your IT, first of all, to get trained on different cloud technologies also because the talent is scarce there. And if you can really go and teach them with one, one interface and have them run with the choice of infrastructure or the platform or the cloud, that's what we think that we can make a huge difference for the customers. Yeah, so I want to make sure I understand when you talk about your hybrid or even your multi-cloud strategy, we've got kind of zeitclusters, helps you get in and matches what you have on site. We haven't had any conversation about Kubernetes yet. Where does carbon, which is the Nutanix, Kubernetes fit into this overall discussion? Is that just part of the platform and gets baked in and therefore we don't need to talk about it or am I missing a piece? Yeah, that's a great question because the beauty of what we're talking about with zeitclusters is that we bring the entire software and the entire platform with us wherever we go and part of that stack is carbon and com, really the ability to have both traditional applications alongside modern applications with Kubernetes and even hybrid applications that include some front-end that might be containerized, maybe back-end that is not yet containerized and all that, everything that we've been doing on-prem can now be moved into any other public cloud that we provide. It's part of the compute, right? You've got the VMs, now you've got the containers, it's part of the platform. All right, so yeah, we've heard some people say Kubernetes is just the new containerized compute there so that we don't need to talk about it and I'm okay with that because it's just in there. Yes, absolutely. Excellent, Gil and Manoj, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks so much for hosting us. Thanks for having us, yeah. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .next.