 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are live on the show floor at AWS re-invent 19 with thousands of people. Stu and I have one of our CUBE alum back joining us. We've got Gail Habermann, senior director of cloud services from Nutanix, welcome back. Thank you for having me. And you're on brand with your Nutanix pin. I'm running for president of Nutanix right here. All right, so here we are day three of re-invent, 65,000 or so folks here. This show floor has been non-stop for days. Big theme has been about outposts and what outposts and what AWS is doing there. But Nutanix, you guys have been talking about hybrid cloud for years. What does all of the buzz about outposts, what does that mean for you guys? I think this GA really validates our strategy and what we've been hearing from customers for many years around the need for hybrid and more broadly, I think consistency. Consistency across environments as a way or means to actually adopt hybrid in an effective manner as a long-term strategy. And I think AWS now realizing that and working in this direction, we see that with outposts and with what they're announcing with local as well. The idea is that you really need to have a consistent way to manage across different environments and ideally same constructs as well. And that's what they're doing specifically with outposts. The direction we've been taking is the same where our software can run both on-prem but also in public cloud and edge so that the same applications whether traditional or modern can run in the same way so that not only mobility is easy but people can use the same skill sets that they've developed over many years across different environments. Yeah, Gil, it's been fascinating for me to watch the maturation of the market. Of course, Nutanix's original design was let's take these hyper scale type of architectures and bring it to the enterprise. Now we're seeing the intersection of what's happening at the enterprise and the public cloud and the environment. But, you know, dial back a few years the first time Nutanix came to the show it was right after the acquisition of a small company called Zai. And it was like, okay, it was exciting but the Nutanix and Amazon connection was we're trying to all figure out how the dots go together. Fast forward to today, you know, bring us up to, you know, how Amazon, Nutanix and those solutions work together for your customers. Sure, so the latest initiative that we have announced as early access is Nutanix clusters where we use our software, not only on-prem now but also on AWS Bermuda instances. So for those who don't know, our software for many years have collapsed storage and compute into a single pool of resources that customers can deploy very easily and scale out as needed on a variety of hardware platforms traditionally in their data centers. Now we use the exact same software but on AWS Bermuda instances. And what that means is that the same applications as is can be used either on-prem or public cloud. So it's really easy for customers for their business and mission critical applications. Yeah, I want to highlight a thing you talked about there that's a bare metal service from Amazon which is a relatively new thing. My understanding that was designed for the VMware on AWS but they're opening up for ecosystem partners to do. And you said Nutanix clusters. Is that what I had heard about at dot next and was called Zai clusters before? Yes, as part of this early access we've renamed this to Nutanix clusters. But yes, it's the same idea. And the idea is really that customers can now use our software in AWS. You see other cloud vendors also starting to offer bare metal services for this exact reason. And we're really evolving our company as well where our software itself is going to be portable. So customers know they deploy our software for example on-prem today. They have a direct path to AWS and other clouds in the future. Because we have heard from many customers that perhaps re-platform, let's say to AWS now they're not sure what to do if they ever wanted to go to another vendor, right? So what we're trying to do is have a single platform that can support multiple clouds and also the software itself has to be portable and so that's the path we're on. For that portability, what are some of the key use cases that it will enable customers to achieve? So many times now we hear that customers are not looking to manage their physical infrastructure anymore and so in cases where perhaps they acquired multiple companies and they have kind of a data center sprawl, they want to consolidate. One option is to consolidate into a SQL data center but another option now would be to consolidate into AWS location near them or in the region that they need. But the key here in the case of clusters is that the same VMs, same third party integrations they've had, daily practices, can now work simply managed on AWS as opposed to managing their own data center. So it eases the operational burden but it does not require a big lift and re-platforming to achieve that. Yeah, so I was hearing, sorry, so I was hearing one of the loud and clear when you were saying that operational efficiency seems pretty loud and clear as a key benefit. Absolutely. All right, so Gil, what you're describing there really reminds me of what I'm hearing from customers when they're talking about one of the reasons that they're adopting Kubernetes. Of course, Amazon has various ways to leverage Kubernetes, especially EKS. They announced the Fargate being supported there. I know Nutanix has carbon. Do carbon, Nutanix clusters, how does that go together in the whole Kubernetes story? Yeah, so when I talk about clusters it's really the entire software that we have that can be used across environments and that software stack includes many aspects to it. Of course, the core is just having very resilient infrastructure software that you can run applications on but it has many other phases to it and one of them is containers. So like you run virtual machines either on our hypervisor or third party hypervisors you can also run containers on any Kubernetes or our Kubernetes that we support as part of that software and that whole thing is portable. So really what I'm talking about here is very foundational and definitely supports carbon as well so customers know that both traditional and modern applications can be ported across clouds. Give us some customer examples where you've seen a legacy enterprise that has to transform in order to stay in business. I was working with Nutanix to do just that. Yeah, so we have many customers especially on the high end of the market to your point, pharmaceuticals with security concerns, financial services that want to modernize but they have very heavy investments in their traditional and business critical applications and now that their cloud journey is maturing they want to address those workloads. Those workloads are very hard to migrate or to replatform specifically and so they're looking for this way to maintain all the investments that they've done over years but also get the benefits of public clouds where it's appropriate either for migration or for bursting and so having that same software that can run the same VMs as is across multiple environments is a perfect solution for them. You know eliminating the need to utilize different cloud native services maybe they'll do that over time but right now this really helps them save millions because we hear from many customers to your point the CIO has the mandate to do this transformation but I can't do it or my teams have resistance to do it because of this investment. I'm glad you're hitting on that transformation note because Nutanix itself has gone through a bit of a transformation recently all software, that model it feels like we've kind of gone through that transition. What does that help Nutanix learn when you're working with your customers that transformation is not easy that the keynote talked about that you need leadership involved and this test can't be an incremental thing you need to take bold moves to move things forward and Nutanix itself has gone through some of its own transformations. Yeah, absolutely. As always with Nutanix we're very aggressive with execution both in product velocity and here also in terms of business models so we've moved from hardware to software and now to subscription we find that customers absolutely love the notion that they have a lot more flexibility in terms of subscription and as I mentioned before we're evolving this further to support multiple clouds and because we believe the five to 10 years ahead of us are going to be all about cloud everywhere rather than just on-prem we need to support that in terms of our model and so we're going through that transformation ourselves. One of the things also that was talked about this week is just, well, maybe not talked about is multi-cloud, right? That's kind of a four letter word for Amazon but it is often an operating model that we see a lot of customers are in for various reasons maybe not strategic maybe it's more we've inherited this or an enterprise has acquired smaller companies that have myriad cloud solutions and this is more of a reality than anything else. Some of the many announcements that AWS has made this week you talked about this sort of validating the direction that Nutanix has been going in but from what is the signal to you in terms of Amazon's own evolution? Yes, I think we are really seeing an evolution while resisting the change to some extent so I agree with you multi-cloud was absolute no-no hybrid was a no-no now hybrid is embraced I think for a hybrid they really are trying to reach for greater adoption for, I think the hard part like I mentioned before business and emission critical applications that's the main thing I think with multi there's still resistance but it's absolutely critical like you're saying every EBC meeting that I've been here customers talk about multi-cloud because of organic adoption or evolution or acquisitions and so it's absolutely critical to have tooling like our hybrid cloud services that support multiple clouds so we have services that support governance across clouds cost optimization, security compliance automation, self-service all these things really help customers drive towards a more unified or harmonized way of managing multiple environments and it's absolutely critical, I agree. We look into like a magic crystal ball kind of in the spirit of evolution we look at cloud 1.0 John Furrier talks a lot about cloud 2.0 What if you look, say down the road the next five years what do you think the state of cloud is going to look like? I think our vision has been and I really see this materializing as cloud everywhere rather than thinking about cloud as a centralized place where that is the cloud. If you think about even edge requiring heavy local processing real compute, real storage very sensitive in terms of latency for networking maybe our cars even right are going to be a little mobile data centers and so there's going to be a need to have cloud everywhere while still offloading some stuff for centralized processing. So we really need to find a way to bring that cloud everywhere and what we've been working at Nutanix is towards that vision of bringing that platform that has strong resiliency very good latency sensitive workloads everywhere we might need it in preparation for that vision and I think it's going to be very exciting to see how all these vendors and customers evolve their environments over time it's going to be I think very different from what we thought about 20 years ago for sure. Do you see any one industry in particular as really right for this to be able to not just bring cloud everywhere but to live it and really completely flip an industry on its head anything that really kind of pops into your mind? I'm not sure I think in terms of vision it's going to be across industries but the more you have applications that do require that edge processing to be again low latency and robust so IOT use cases for example with retail maybe manufacturing and so on I think we're going to see these guys lead the wave here because they simply cannot offload everything to the cloud but others are going to follow because it just makes sense and if it's not an anomaly then they'll be more comfortable in that process. So much change to come but also so much opportunity. Gil thank you for joining Stu and me on theCube this morning. Great having a great being here thank you very much. Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube live from AWS reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.