 from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE live in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, marching band, floats coming in, Mardi Gras atmosphere, and a slew of new products and updates. Sunil Proti, Chief Product and Development Officer at Nutanix. Sunil, thanks for joining us. Yeah, likewise, Stu, anytime. All right, so a lot that you covered in, so let's get into it. Start with some of the broad company updates. We've been talking about this journey for making everything invisible. I'm waiting that the next time you're going to have the invisible man is, no, no, no, you're putting the person forward. Yeah, you know we talk about that continuum between all the way from mainframes to whatever HCI to now we've got cloud instance, hyperconverged, then cloud, and then there's functions. Then eventually we'll have NAS, which is nothing as a service, right? That's something like that. But our journey, I think, of invisible infrastructure started off with hyperconvergence of computing storage. And essentially it's just increased layers of convergence is how we see it. So if you can converge the networking stack, if you can merge the automation aspects, then we go into invisible data centers, and then eventually if you hyperconverse the clouds, CAPEX and OPEX, public cloud, pirate clouds, distributed clouds, then you get an invisible cloud. So it's essentially, I think that's really how we've sort of professed this conference is invisible infrastructure, evolving to invisible data centers, to evolving to invisible clouds. Yeah, so Sunil, one of the things, if we've been talking to your customers, the question is, who is the Nutanix customer? So when we talked about HCI, even before it was HCI, it was let's get ourselves out of the silos, you're working with the administrators and the architects, as you build some of these things, you've got a new SaaS offering, you've got micro segmentation, you're touching more of the business and sometimes going up the stack too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who do you see as a customer? Yeah, I think for us, if we just stayed as a broad HCI platform play, then we'd probably be slowly making up our way of between the server guys and the storage guys and maybe the director of infrastructure and so forth. And a lot of it has been groundswell movement for Nutanix over the last six, seven years, right? But this is what I talk about it to our customers, like when you actually go to cloud on AWS or GCP, there is no storage admin, there is no server admin, there's only a cloud architect. And so I think that's what we've seen over the last few years is this evolution to this one single org called the cloud org with an enterprises. And then you heard me say this before, it's about this eventually, as we move up our value up the stack, as we go from invisible infrastructure to clouds, our relevancy is also growing to the CIO because the CIO can now be the CAO, which is the Chief Amazon Officer, the Chief Alphabet or the Chief Azure Officer, essentially the Chief Cloud Officer where we can help them blur the lines between AWS Insight, which is Nutanix, and then AWS Outside. Yeah, I love that, because when we talk to customers, it's not I'm building out my multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, composite, whatever you want to call it, it's we're figuring out our digital transformation and we've got applications, we've got stuff we're satisfying, there's cool things I built in the public cloud and I've got my data center and the transformation that I'm going through there. So question I have for you is, what is Nutanix's position in the cloud? I didn't hear you going up on stage saying you're going to put five to $10 billion a year into building out data centers and availability zones and all those things there. Some type of people misconstrue some of the journey and things like XI and they're like, oh, it rhymes with what Amazon's doing or even many times similar services to an Amazon there but partnerships with the public cloud providers and please help us set the record straight that you're not standing up a public cloud. We think increasingly the world of the world of clouds is a dispersed world, right? I mean, you had to say that we think about this concept called the core cloud, which is essentially both a private version and a public version that's harmonized together into this one enterprise core cloud but then increasingly we are seeing a cloud-like architecture in a remote office branch office or in a retail store so we call that the spirit cloud and then it's also with IoT especially, it's getting extended all the way to the edge whether it be a one node Nutanix deployment talking to a data center of clusters talking to GCP for machine learning. So we think that the world of clouds is going to emerge as the de facto standard and public cloud just happens to be a big percentage of that. Private cloud will also be a decent percentage of that so will these other clouds. So what we need is I guess one OS to bind them all, right? And that's the end goal for what we are embarking on and so what one of the things that we've recognized is though one of the different kinds of clouds is an extended enterprise cloud where instead of having two primary data centers and two secondary data centers and then having fly cloud availability zones why even be in the secondary business? What if the secondary data centers were subsumed into a cloud as a service but you retain the same operational tooling as your primary data center? And that's really where Xi's footprint comes in is it's to augment what a customer is going through is journey of private cloud or public cloud to this distributed cloud environment that there will be certain use cases that need to be fulfilled using the same cloud architecture. So Neil let's talk about the customer journey alongside Nutanix's journey. You guys are walking, term I heard a lot so far in the conference is Nutanix is our partner. Our partner in this journey in digital transformation. However, the customer today is very much infrastructure to customers. You guys talk to developers, internal customers of your customers. What has been that story and what has been that conversation? What have you guys learned and what have you taught your customers along? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, look, we genuinely know as I've mentioned on stage today that we're in another decade's worth of journey as we go from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. That's not going to happen in six months or so. But what we're finding is that in the last, I would say four to five years the view of what cloud can be used for the why of cloud has changed. Initially it used to be, oh, I need to get past IT by developers. Then it eventually became owner and I need to use it as a way to deliver a better IT. Now it's being used as a way to actually drive my business. And that's why we use the word digital transformation just because it's a direct connotation to driving the top line, right? So when you look at our customers and the journey that we are on, we also want to set expectations of what we are versus what we are not, right? So we're not about enabling the applications to be built in the sense that we're not application software companies. But at the end of the day though, if we can abstract out all the, if I can call it issues below an app and allow IT or the business to focus on a new org that we are calling the CIO and the CTO merged to be the CDO, right? The Chief Digital Officer. That becomes one org. And that's what we're seeing with many of our large customers is many of our customers are their orgs either they were in the CIO organization or the infrastructure organization or the cloud organization. They're all now being merged into the CDO org and the goal then becomes for it to power a digital transformation through various apps. But without, it's essentially leveraging infrastructure as a, in a bot anchor, right? It's more of an accelerator at that point. So there's debate on where that ends. Like, you know, we can talk about it with edge computing, like where does edge start and the core begin. The same thing with infrastructure. You guys made a really interesting announcement around your capability with databases today and being able to, I don't even know the term but to put a prism-like experience to databases. Talk about those areas around what we've considered traditionally infrastructure, storage, network, compute. And as we go on to this middleware layer, what do you think you can help customers simplify their journey? I mean, I think just to recap some of the ways that we have, you know, approached this year is, we think about it as three layers of the cloud stack which is we had compute storage visualization and we sort of completed the IAS stack with our flow product which delivers one-click secure networks. And then for the first time, even though our stack is good for running third-party workloads, just like the public cloud runs a lot of past services, increasingly in enterprises, customers are asking for an opinionated view of a past service. So we do have third-party partnerships with cloud. Error, Hortonworks, a whole bunch of other third-party providers, but the core database workload, especially with Oracle being such a complex piece, but it's mainstream. Customers said, look, if you can you provide a one plus one equals three kind of solution for the world of databases. And that's what Nutanix Error is and that sort of becomes a sort of cornerstone of our first past service where we are trying to simplify database operations, including things like Oracle Rack and that's what we demonstrated was to actually provision Oracle Rack in minutes make loans, create dev instances and democratize databases for the rest of developers using APIs. So that's the sort of evolution up the stack for us with Nutanix Error. And then we didn't stop there. We also sort of, if I can call it, innovated with our first Nutanix SaaS service with this product called Beam with the acquisition of Minjar, which essentially says, look, multicloud needs to start with visibility. And then obviously you enable control and then you add operational automation and then visibility and so forth, right? So with Beam there, it sort of sets the stage for the fact that we can now add more to the multicloud portfolio. Sunil, Beam's an interesting one, which are your first SaaS offering. Keith and I were talking before this. There are lots of companies out there that are trying to tackle this challenge with that have every single platform company out there is trying to tackle this and then there's lots of independence. There's a lot that goes into maintaining, advising, the whole consultancy world has spent decades doing this. How do you balance product development efforts there versus your core platform? This be an indication that you're going to build out a SaaS portfolio in the future? You know what I mean? Got it, got it. I know it's a great question. So I think just to take a step back, Minjar was an interesting company because Netsil, the other acquisition is also born in the cloud SaaS service that will integrate for a hybrid visibility into networking, but also standalone application operations. But Minjar had this interesting history where it was originally a high-end advisory service for AWS. It was in the top five service partners for AWS and they actually had dozens of customers that they still operate and manage and provide, get a lot of learnings from helping customers sort of, they're like the Navy SEALs of AWS and so forth. And then when they built this product, which is now called as BEAM, what we think about it is that, look, that particular capability is a feature of a platform. It's not a standalone product category. What people are going to be looking forward to is a multi-cloud operational fabric that has an app store in a marketplace where I can go in and consume services, whether it be on-prem or off-prem, have a single pane of glass for visibility, again on-prem or off-prem, and then do one click automation or orchestration. And so the fact that this single pane of glass has to cut over on-prem as well as public clouds is the reason why we believe Nutanix has a play here to kind of make it a core feature because we at least own one pillar of it, which is the on-prem stack. And to the extent that we can do a honest job of extending it to do a deep job on AWS and GCP and others, then I think there's value at it. How do you get closer to the application? When I look at this space, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, I've all been talking some similar messages on this and the cloud strategies that they've gone through have that operational model and they own these applications. So why Nutanix? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, it's another interesting question. So look, I think the world of apps, and I would say the power shift is happening, obviously. We know that with IBM, but even with Oracle as a mainstream enterprise app, if you really look at say a public cloud conference, especially AWS' conference, if anything the only vendor that they take part charts at is Oracle, because they see it as low-hanging fruit in the enterprise from a complexity side, right? And I think with the advent of cloud, the first time that customers have seen a real alternative to move away from this SQL engine on Oracle to a potential Postgres or other alternatives. But to do that, you need abstractions. I need to be able to simplify my current environment of Oracle at the same time, doing it a way that I can actually harmonize the API so that, oh, at some point, can I actually create another instance but it's on Postgres, right? And the more I can provide that abstracted API is the more flexibility that's there for the customers to actually move from this legacy apps to the next generation apps. So I think, I guess the simple answer to your question is, look, for us, even if you're not in the app business, if anything, it's an asset and a liability because then we can be completely neutral to the transformation from the old to the new. We have no skin in the game of keeping you in the old architecture. So if a customer says, look, I need to manage my old but I need an accelerated way to get to the new cloud native apps, then we're all for it. So, Sunil, one of the, I think, I would call this one of the first principles of new technology is this ideal of one click, provisioning the ability to simplify really complex, really hard things. You guys did it with HCI. The database management piece is another example. You're talking about it now with HCS and cloud. Let's talk about what happens when you zig in the case of going with Docker, the leading solution at the time, see if you might the right approach to go. Now you guys are zagging. What makes Nutanix capable of making such a quick change and providing the consistent layer, like as customers go along with you on this journey and they account on APIs, they account on integrations, they account on just that basic capability and that it's stable, what gives customers the comfort level that you know what, the complex stuff Nutanix will take care of if there needs to be a course correction from a culture and development platform perspective they can write this shit. Yeah, and I think do your first question there, Keith. I think, look, in this era now, it doesn't matter which business you're in, the time to succeed obviously is accelerated but the time to fail is also accelerated, right? We just have to internalize that in our DNA I would say of any high growth company is to just be honest about failing fast. And yeah, I mean, I think Docker was a thing a year and a half ago and we were early to market. It was, and in fact, I would say it was our ACs and a couple of guys in Europe who actually recognized that look, why are we focusing on all this when every customer that I talked to is testing out Kubernetes. And sure, we were standing in Silicon Valley and Kubernetes was just coming up and so forth. And so I think it's two things. One, the internalization that, look, we have to fail fast in a high growth business like us. And then two, having these sensors that give us indications of are we in the right course or not is also important. And so the other thing that I would say that has worked well with this company and my prior companies is the fact that it's, while it is hierarchical for scale, it is one is to end from a communications perspective. Whether it's things like Slack, things like the communication mechanism, allow us to have that real-time touch with the guys that focus on the customers and so forth. So for example, once the clarity was there around ACs to kind of zag on Kubernetes, the whole system was able to lean in because the why of doing that was clear. The what and the how followed. And that's really how we keep it going. All right, Sunil, before we let you go, want to bring back to the infrastructure side. You've had a few of the solutions that are growing really fast. I know you've highlighted the AFS, the Acropolis file services. I've got the new object service that just got announced. At core platform, what are the areas that are catching wildfire? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So on the core platform, which is still a bread and butter, to some extent our core focus has been about it becoming like the OS for the enterprise, period. And there's no workloads left as an island. And right now, three years ago, we were talking about workloads that we're good for. Nowadays I talk about workloads that we're not good for. So if I'm a scale up database that requires certification, I can tell you about some of those that we are short of getting certified, but once that happens, there should be no workload that we're not good for. And that's where AFS comes in, that's where object services come in, is these are all requirements in the core OS that are needed to solve for those kinds of workloads. And one thing though, to Keith's earlier point, that we've tried to keep honest, and that's why some of these take longer to come out, is that they still have to hold the bar of instant upgrades. Start small, start quickly, pay as you grow. They all have to follow the same ground rules, right? And that is what is keeping us honest, frankly, in the overall design. Want to give you the final word, Keith said, your customers consider Nutanix a partner? As they leave Nutanix.NEXT 2018, how should they be considering Nutanix? No, I think leaving Nutanix, they should recognize us as a company that obviously continues to be hungry, continues to have a bold vision. We, in our core values, we'll make mistakes, we are vulnerable, but we're hopefully transparent about it. So that's the end of the day, the core essence of a partnership is that level of transparency between two people, right? So, and that's what we're hoping that customers will take away from the conference. All right, well, Sunil, it's always been a pleasure to document everything going at, since the inaugural, next back in Miami, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next show, where we'll make sure to pin you on, you know, how we've gone first. So, Sunil Bodhi and Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.