 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Julie O'Brien. She is the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing. Welcome, Julie. Thank you. And we have Michelle Taylor-Smith, the Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. So over 6,500 attendees, there were 20,000 people who were live streaming the keynote. You have a huge audience. Congratulations on the show. Thank you. What are you hoping attendees come away with and customers and partners who are here? What is sort of the big message that you want people to come away with? Yeah, so I mean, this year for us, it's our 10th anniversary as a company. And we are so humbled and honored to have all of these customers and partners on the journey with us. So a big part of the show is just to say thank you for being an early builder, believer, and dreamer with us. And the best is yet to come. So lots of innovation happening in HCI and really trying to show people how we can be the right partner for them as they're moving to the hybrid cloud. D. Rogers earlier talking about his journey as well. And it's interesting just a few years ago, you were still raising money. You weren't even public. Now you're public, 10 years old, but there's still the entrepreneurial energy. Yes. You know, he calls it the billion dollar startup. And there's now competition. So game is on. Everyone's seeing the success. It's out there. It's not like hitting in plain sight like it was just a few years ago. You guys have doing great congratulations. Thank you. Now you have competition. You got loyal customers. What's next? What's the big strategy and how you guys build on that momentum? What are you guys thinking about? Oh boy. I would say, you know, as we look at the customer journey, right? The step one is really about modernizing your data center. That is our sweet spot. That's where Nutanix started as a company, HCI, right? Step two is really about how do we help customers take all that goodness that they see with the public cloud and bring that into their own private cloud. We call that an enterprise cloud. And then really the next step of the journey but a customer may already be there today is how do I bridge multiple clouds, right? And multiple clouds to customers could be the edge which might be an IoT application. It could be a remote office, branch office. So what that cloud strategy looks like for people could be very different depending what vertical they're in, what industry they're in. So I would say what to watch for us and what's next is we're all headed with this next generation of many clouds, not just one. And you guys have a monster net promoter score which is a score that measures loyalty and if your customers would promote it to their peers. It's like 90, it's like a monster score. It's been over 90 on average for the last five years now which is no easy feat. And you know, we talk to customers all the time, keep us hungry, keep us honest, right? Tell us how we're doing. And we want to keep that score high too because that's a great reflection of how they're valuing the relationship, not just the product, but what happens after you buy the product. So yeah, and we know as we evolve the portfolio going from just HCI to multiple products that will get harder. So we've got to start to figure out how do we bring in some AI, some maybe machine learning so that when you call in and you might be a flow customer and Rebecca might be an HCI customer we know how to route you to the right person the right time which is really nice. As you know, when you call support you want to get somebody right there who's not saying, hold on, let me pass you to Michelle. Michelle's saying, hold on, let me pass you to John, right? You want an expert that's going to carry you all the way through and hopefully you heard some great stories this morning. Some of our early customers who have shared that what it's meant for them. So delighting customers is obviously your top priority but Nutanix is doing a lot of other kind of good good in the world. I want to bring you into the conversation a little, Michelle tell us about the Heart Initiative. Absolutely, so I've been with Nutanix for a little over six and a half years now and this spirit of giving and caring has been with the company. I actually used to run channel marketing but it's been with that though the whole time that I've been there but about three years ago Julie actually asked if I wanted to start .heart or actually start our CSR program which became .heart and it's an amazing way of giving back. In fact last year it got incorporated officially into our values of hungry, humble and honest done with heart and so it absolutely is part it just intrinsic in the company. So what we do is we're very conscious and aware of diversity and so we put a lot of effort towards helping women and underrepresented groups pursue their love of technology. And this is also sort of a maybe a sub theme of the show is that inclusion and that element to it. So talk about some of the sessions that you're having particularly to help bring up women in tech and also underrepresented minorities. Absolutely. Do you want to talk about what we're doing in the booth and I can talk about the women's lunch? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we are doing so women and underrepresented groups and actually people just starting their careers don't have the same network that people with established careers have. And so what we're doing in our booth this time is we're collecting career advice. And so in effect what we're doing is we're bringing the advice to people because they don't necessarily have the same networks to go out and ask. And for every piece of advice that we get we're going to donate $5 to an organization called Ignite which helps high school girls become aware of and pursue careers in STEM. So it's been great so far. I love when people come up there and they're, you know, what are you doing? And all of a sudden you start telling them they're like, well, they should do this and I'm like write it down. And so we're actually, we have a wall and people write down their advice and we put it up on the wall and then after the event we're going to collect it and start putting it into a blog. And then we also have a Twitter program that we're doing or a Twitter initiative that we're doing right now that once a week we send out some of the advice and get people to chime in and add more advice. So it's been a lot of fun. Yes, and then every dot next for the past few we've been doing a women in tech lunch. And so I know one of your guest speakers later today is going to be Dr. Ayanna Harward from Georgia Tech on robotics. So she's actually going to be sharing some of her thoughts on mentorship at the women's lunch. We also have a longtime Nutianics friend and advisor Harvard Business School Professor Deepak Mahaltra who is very much focused on the art of negotiation to solve conflicts. And he's going to be talking about how to do things like how do you negotiate a salary increase? Some of those sweaty palm conversations that you need to have as you're moving through your career. So those are two of our speakers. And then we also have two sponsors that are also going to be spending some time too from Veritas. Veritas and WWT. And WWT. So I want to put you two both on the spot. You're both women in technology and we know about from the unfortunate headlines about just the bro culture that exists in technology and we also know about the dearth of women leaders in this industry. And this industry that is shaping our social, political, economic lives in such important ways today. So what are, what is some career advice that you're going to put up there on the board? How would you, what would you say to a young woman who is entering this field? Oh, I have got so much to say on this. How much time do we have? I think one thing that I've learned along the way is sometimes, you know, women tend to be very heads down if I do a great job, someone will notice and I will move forward. And sometimes we're not comfortable with popping our heads up and helping to market a little bit about what we have done and making sure that people see the goodness, right? And that might not feel right or it might feel like you're overly marketing yourself, but I think being able to articulate what you want and why you deserve it is so important and don't view it as tooting your own horn, view it as an opportunity to share how you're contributing and where you want to see that path forward and just don't be afraid to ask what you want, what your ultimate goals are. Mine falls into a principle of Nutanix, which is get comfortable being uncomfortable and basically if you get an opportunity, go for it. And I'll be very candid when Julie offered me this role and she said, do you want to do CSR? I thought it meant customer service rep and I'm like, mm-mm, I don't want to do it at all. And then she said, oh no, it's social responsibility and I still thought, I had no idea what it was and the fact that, you know, Julian team were willing to take a chance on me doing it, but the fact of just going absolutely out of my comfort zone, learning something new, trying something new and just going for it was great and I would tell people to do that all the time and it'll just, it'll teach you so much more even about the roles that you know about, just going and doing something different will teach you so much more about yourself and about other roles, so. It's great advice, yeah. We also hear about mentoring and paying it forward. Yes. What do you guys do there? Because a lot of younger generations coming into the workforce who don't have the scar tissue or experience, the networks are now starting to establish. This is an opportunity. It is a big opportunity. So Wendy Pfeiffer, who's our CIO, sits on the board of Girls in Tech. So we're very involved there. She is so warm and so open about helping to pass on what she's learned along the way too. I think anyone that you run into at Nutanix is very honored and humbled to be approached as a mentor. There are a number of women that I mentor inside of Nutanix as well as outside of Nutanix and I think it's so important to help people understand what you've learned, whether good or bad along the way, right? Because just like we're learning here at Dot Next, with peer conversations, what have you done? What have you tried? You need that in your progression, in your career too. I don't know if there's anything that you'd, two things I would add is, one is nobody got to where they are in their career without somebody helping them along the way. And so there's a big discussion now, which is actually what Dr. Howard is going to talk about, that goes beyond mentorship to sponsorship. And so how do you actually help push people forward and help them in their careers? And then the other thing too is, I was listening to something the other day, it was a really interesting conversation that before, there were ways that people could oppress other people in society. And what they're saying now today, people are helping to oppress different groups is the fact of who you help. And so when you think about who you can help, think about outside of your friends, kids or someone, who else can you help there that wouldn't normally have access to somebody like you or somebody like in your circle or whatever. And that's hugely helpful. And without just helping the same group continue to progress generation after generation. Hanging forward to different circles, yeah. And expanding the network. Exactly, exactly. So this is a hugely competitive industry and I know that Nutanix cannot hire sales and marketing people fast enough to. What are you doing after this? I was going to ask you though, how do you market Nutanix to prospective applicants? What is it? I mean, you just talked about the ability to reinvent yourself as an employee, which is something that so many people are looking for in a long career, doing different things, being in different fields and really getting to experience other things. But what are the other, what's sort of the unique selling points for Nutanix that you try to bring on new people? Yeah, so the culture, I think, is so differentiating overall. So Michelle mentioned, you know, hungry, humble, honest with heart. And so it's our job in marketing to also help our recruiting teams get that message out and not just show people these are the words, but actually give them great stories. Michelle just put together a super fun campaign. I don't know if it's in the wild yet. It's hitting probably next week is when it's hitting. It was actually, it's featuring real Nutanix employees, sharing their feelings about being at Nutanix. The initial pass is all still shots, but you can actually see the fun that people are having from all ages, you know, genders. It's a really diverse, fun set of actual employees. So it's really, you know, in this day and age, you can get a job anywhere, right? But where is that job going to make you feel excited to get out of bed every morning, right? And I firmly believe that's the culture that we have at Nutanix and we got a day or other. I would add to that is it's dubbed internally as the you campaign and it's about you matter. So how you can get go get a job anywhere, but are you oftentimes going to go get stuck in a corner and you're going to sit there and code or you're going to go sit there and do that or you're working on one piece of one feature of this. At Nutanix you actually have opportunities to work on big, bold projects, experience, contributing and honestly, mattering as an individual, which I think is huge and you're not just a number. Yeah, great. Great. Well, Julie and Michelle, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really fun time talking to you. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit.