 It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts, across the mass pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program, Mike Berthew, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. Well, as always, Stu, it's great to be here. This is number three for us, I think. It's become a bit of a tradition. The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here, and, as I say, nice home game after lots of travels around the globe, talking about lots of technologies. For sure, I'll get forward to it. Like, what I always love digging in in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have 189 users. Many of them are Nutanix customers. So, let's start there, is what's top of mind from your customers today? A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing, and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day, it's all about IT providing bit value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we're just speaking about this in my session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So, and many of the folks working in the trenches realize that, yeah, public cloud actually does make sense for some things, but not necessarily everything. The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud and figure out how to make that work. So, that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is, from a product portfolio, Nutanix and what we're doing, we're really very much in lockstep with that. Yeah, you know, when I think back, you know, when that whole wave of hyperconverged infrastructure, HCI, which Nutanix to its credit never was like HCI, HCI, it was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it's that software that drives the company, that there, the founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So, when you hear, you know, well, the promise of public cloud is it's supposed to be simple and economic. Well, public cloud we understand is neither simple nor cheap. That's right. Hyperconverged infrastructure did simplify environments and changes the economics of how we think of it. When I've talked to Nutanix customers, it's like, oh hey, I no longer need to do constant care of feeding of this stack of wires and stuff put together, much of it is much simpler. So, you know, you talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, you know, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Allen in his presentation said something that I thought resonated with me, which is you don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, kind of just you ended up there by mistake without plans, and unfortunately that's where a lot of IT is. I've got lots of projects that I do and I do them as I need them and then I realize, oh wait, somebody's going to manage, maintain and pull all these things together. So, help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just kind of where people that might not have looked in a couple of years know the appliance. Yeah, sure, and I think from our, and you mentioned before, our roots really come from those big, large public cloud environments like Google and Amazon and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud, and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot of separate silos, right? And as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating, you're creating operational disruption and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud A, public cloud B, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with all, with different management tools, there's not a ton of value there from a simplicity standpoint. So what we strive to do is we strive to create that abstraction, right? That consistent single control plane that goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud so I can manage my resources in the public cloud in the same way I would on-premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like my cloud native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end of the day, businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are. It should be whatever is most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer or you are an executive, where my application is, it shouldn't matter. It should be just be able to, it should be available wherever I am. Yeah, Mike, one of the things that's been interesting in Washington Nutanix is not just the growth of the core market, but it's kind of got this three tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today, are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally, and any kind of proof points you can give us that kind of help us understand the strategy a bit more? I think the majority of the customers running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world, are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right? And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense, right? They're getting the simplicity, having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities and the higher level features, in order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation, right? So that solid core foundation is our core HCI platform, or our cloud-like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is when you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, your software-defined data center, it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud. So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon, for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture, that's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way and have true hybrid cloud, you've got to follow their playbook and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe that Nutanix is that right choice. Yeah, and in many ways, we're seeing the blurring of the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix at some of the Kubernetes show that experience that I have in Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. Absolutely, absolutely. I think the Nirvana, again, if we can imagine what this is all going to look like five years from now, it's a single portal, a single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service or an application, and when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go. It's going to put it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon or it needs to go on Azure, the decision is going to be made based on business logic as opposed to technology decision, which I think is where it matters. So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, so Winslow Technologies here is a big Dell partner. 100%. And they sell the Dell XC solution here. There are people out there and there's like, well, the Dell relationship, yes, they are one of Nutanix's biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out of the market and you look at market share, the biggest alternative to a Nutanix HCI option is the Dell EMC VX rail. So help us understand that dynamic, how that's playing out in your world. Yeah, that's a great question. And I kind of expected the controversial questions as always on the queue, so thanks, Stu. But in terms of that, I mean, I would say that, when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. I mean, there's pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah, combining compute and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space and having mobility of applications across hypervisors and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them, the discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I mean, I think, again, our view, our perspective, you mentioned simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice. We don't wanna lock our customers into any more particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice. We don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization, for example, in Kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy Kubernetes on-prem, leveraging the open source version in Kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on any of the hypervisors we support, right? So that's an important distinction too. It's not like we're telling you you have to run one particular hypervisor to get X feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. Yeah, that's great. Just last thing, Mike, yeah, I gotta imagine your customers are asking you a lot of questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little bit like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure Stack, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when they start calling and asking about these technologies? Well, if you look at the history, we've been doing this for a long time now. I've been here for over five years and Nutanix has been doing this since we released our product back in 2011 after a couple of years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else and we also really built our platform around the mantra that we are highly scalable, distributed architecture, enabling choice and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us stand out. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription-based business model, it makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors can do. All right, Mike Perth, it's always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, Stu. All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. As I supposed to.