>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C.,
it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back to Washington, D.C. everybody.
This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.
My name is Dave Vellante.
I'm here with Stu Miniman, this is day two
of our coverage of .NEXT Conf #NEXTConf.
Wendy M. Pfeiffer is here.
She's the relatively new CIO of Nutanix.
Wendy, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having me, good to be here.
>> Okay, you got my attention.
You said there's a reason for it.
>> Reason for the M? >> For the M.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
It's my mom's middle initial,
her middle name is Michelle.
My middle name is Michelle
and my ten-year-old daughter Holly's
middle name is Michelle and we sort of
pass along our female heritage.
I send Holly a message whenever I do anything publicly
that it's a shout out to her.
She gets to lead, she gets to be proud
of her feminine heritage as well as her family heritage.
>> I love that, that is fantastic.
Quick aside, I'm going to make you laugh.
We're at the race track one day
and there was this one guy, and he was winning
and I wasn't winning so I said,
it's like the eighth race,
How are you doing this?
Well his last name began with an M.
He goes, I'm just betting on all the horses with an M in it.
>> That could be another good reason.
Thanks for the tip.
>> Anyway, welcome to theCUBE
and welcome to Nutanix.
Five months in on the job,
you got a really strong IT background.
GoPro, Yahoo,
both companies of senior leadership.
Robert Half, I think, was on the resume as well.
>> Yeah, CISCO Systems, Exodus Communications.
>> You've seen it all. >> Which means I'm old.
I've been around a long time.
Any company, I would work anywhere.
>> Not as old as I am, honey.
So, what's the experience been like at Nutanix?
Tell us about the onboarding.
>> It is a playground, I love it.
Nutanix, I was hoping that they would have
the technology that I love and they do.
It's one of the first places I've worked
where it doesn't matter if I need
server storage, we have that.
It's pretty cool.
I have a really amazing team
and then the leadership there is fantastic.
It's also the first time in my career
where I'm working for a company that sells to CIO's
and so my opinion of our product matters.
I get to be customer number one,
drink our champagne, that sort of thing.
In fact, I'm on that path,
we call it Eat Your Own Dog Food,
when I came on board and I said,
I don't want the dog food.
We're going to be drinking our own champagne.
I want the good stuff.
I'm getting to play and just experience the product
and experience that process
and then people care what I think,
people who are developing product
care what I think and that's great.
>> Are the sales guys dragging you into
situations as well? >> They are totally dragging me
into situations.
I'm not that compelling in direct sales
but I have been giving them some tips
on how to sell to CIO's.
Just letting them know how to approach us,
and some of the things that we care about
and don't care about.
What's great as well is, I'm not very good
at being fake, so when I talk about using our product
and when I'm excited about our product,
it's pretty, you know, it's genuine.
If I don't like something, you know that too.
>> Well CIO's, you're part of a network.
>> We are. >> And that network
is sort of immutable,
in my opinion. >> It's a secret cabal.
It really is, we get together in treehouses
and exchange the password.
>> But there's a code, right?
>> There is. >> You're not going to give
another one of your peers some bad advice,
even if you are a CIO of a company
that's trying to sell to them.
>> That's right.
It's a small circle.
I do belong to some groups that get together
and talk about some of our common challenges
and one of our cardinal rules is that
no vendors are allowed and there's no selling.
We do, if we have some expertise, we'll share that
but we really don't cross that line.
So when I do give advice, they know it's genuine,
as much as possible.
>> Wendy, we always like to ask CO's,
what's challenging you today?
Typical IT, we always said for years,
it was like, Okay, your headcount next year
is going to be flat, your budget's going to be declining.
What do you see when you're talking to your peers?
What are some of the biggest challenges that they see?
>> It's a few things.
One thing is, the transformation that's happening
around digital technologies and moving into the cloud.
It's requiring a transformation of skill sets as well.
We really have a challenge, first of all,
in deciding, if we have traditional IT folks,
how do we transform their skill sets?
How do you make an infrastructure guy or gal
someone who writes code?
That's one thing and just a dearth of talent.
There aren't enough people entering the workforce.
That's one thing.
Another thing is, really just about
the pace of innovation.
By nature, when you get to a senior executive level,
you're almost less innovative
than you might've originally been
but we're supposed to be the paragons of innovation
and new ideas and so we struggle with that.
We struggle to keep it fresh and reinvent ourselves.
I left a fairly traditional career
to go to GoPro, just because of that desire
to reinvent myself and try something hard and new.
We've got that struggle as well.
I'd think as well, just the changing business models, too.
There's a lot, we're always balancing
CapEx, OpEx, a lot of us have a big investment
in OpEx and in SaaS
and then trying to balance that with CapEx.
We've always got those challenges.
I think that's a lot of it.
>> Wendy, we're 10 years into this journey
of what cloud and how it's going to affect it
and the role of the CIO is something that's been
in the center of it.
Does the CIO become irrelevant?
Does he become a broker of services?
You talked a little bit about some of the changing roles.
How was your viewpoint on cloud,
has it changed over the last few years
in some of your different roles
and I'm curious inside of Nutanix,
how public cloud fits into what you use.
>> I think there's a couple of layers.
One layer that doesn't go away is operations.
Whether it's taking operational expertise
and transforming that into code for DevOps,
or whether it's transforming it into process
for on-premise infrastructure,
you have to have that knowledge
and you have to have that leadership
so I don't think the need for leadership
is ever really going away.
I think the center of leadership is changing
over time and has sort of moved from place to place
but ultimately,
we have to have folks who understand
how to build whatever it is, to scale,
who understand how to flex,
who understand how to deal with crisis.
Then also, there's some fundamentals
towards architecture and building blocks.
Yes, we're architecting differently.
We're architecting with code in the cloud
but the principles underlying those things
are relatively the same.
I don't think that the functions,
the need for leadership, is going away at all
but I do think that
we have to be flexible in our thinking.
I will say the title CIO
it's actually never kind of been right.
Chief Digital Officer or Chief AWS Officer.
All of those things are not exactly right.
We need to not be so precious about titles
and just go back to thinking and leading
and innovating and let the titles take care of themselves.
>> I got to still ask you about
this emergent role of the Chief Data Officer.
We can all agree data's important,
whatever bromide you want to use,
data's the new oil and so forth and so on.
Many of the chief data officers that we've talked to
are individuals that maybe do a lot of governance,
lot of things that CIO's generally aren't responsible for.
Yet at the same time, data is becoming
this new competitive advantage
and it's so important to information technology.
What are your thoughts on data,
helping companies become data-driven
and what is the role of the CIO in that context?
>> First of all, data is really, really important.
How a company deals with its data
is a gigantic differentiator.
Obviously, we have all this opportunity
in the areas of machine learning
and potentially AI and so on.
When I was at Yahoo, one of the things I worked on
was our privacy initiatives and even back then,
we had the ability to ingest a lot of data
about our users and we had the ability,
algorithmically, to do behavioral targeting.
But we had to make some ethical decisions
and some compliance decisions about
how we used that data and so,
the technology has been available for some time,
but where we haven't caught up is in policy.
I think that Chief Data Officer
is really at the nexus of creating policy,
understanding capabilities and deciding
how we apply those things.
We've always needed that role.
Sometimes it's the CIO,
sometimes it's the Chief Privacy Officer,
we've always needed that role
but the role is a little bit different, I think,
with data because of the power of the data.
I do think there's a need for
some knowledge of the law, GDPR is coming down
from Europe and there's a key factor there.
Ultimately, data needs to be treated like an asset.
It's product as much as anything else.
I think someone who's akin to a Chief Product Officer
needs to handle the company's data
and that data needs to imbue the product,
it needs to go to market plans.
It also can be a reflection of the culture
of the company, as well.
Even collecting data on ourselves
and how we operate and how our employees move
through their cycles is very, very powerful.
Always with ethics, though.
That's the thing that, if you leave data
in the hands of pure engineers or pure technologists,
then you need some sorts of checks and balances as well
because sometimes we're overcome by the possibilities
of the technology, without thinking through
the possibilities that affect human beings.
We need that balance.
>> I've always felt like the CIO
is the field general and should be implementing
the data strategy but he or she shouldn't be
necessarily responsible for, Okay,
how are we going to monetize the data?
Who has access to data?
What are the data policies?
That seems like a full-time job
but there is overlap, though.
>> It's messy, right?
A lot of times it has to do with,
I mean at that sea level,
those are all board-level positions, right?
Ultimately, we're responsible for
the financial health of the company
>> Sure. >> At that level.
Really, we're playing to our strengths.
Sometimes we come to the table
and we understand how to monetize data.
Sometimes we come to the table
and we know how to efficiently manage operations.
There's usually a mix.
There's somebody with a CTO or a CPO or a CIO title
or a Chief Data Officer title,
but it's less about the title
and more about those strengths that show up
around the executive table
but there needs to be somebody,
or maybe a combination of a couple of somebodies,
who are hungry for the value that they can derive
from that data and accrue that to value to the company.
>> It's some notion of swim lanes for accountability
but recognizing there's some overlap.
We got to talk about women in tech, but go ahead.
>> Just two things, Wendy. >> Did you notice I'm a girl?
>> As a technology leader,
I'm curious if you see differences
between yourself being a technology leader
in Silicon Valley and those outside the Valley
and the second one, just curious
if you've had any learnings working now
for a company that sells to the enterprise
versus being on the consumer side of the house
at GoPro and some of the others?
>> Silicon Valley is a bubble.
We all breathe our own oxygen.
We think we're pretty cool.
We tend to be libertarian as a group
and therefore, we have libertarian policies
that are embodied in how we develop code,
how we create product and we're creating
our own little culture but we're not in sync
with a lot of the rest of the world.
Luckily, one of the pieces of our culture
is about building things that are open
and so people can repurpose our technologies
in ways that make sense for them.
The other thing is, even more profound,
is the effect of millennials on
both Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley.
Millennials are changing how we develop code,
how we organize our companies, et cetera.
Your other question, can't remember.
>> Consumer versus selling to the enterprise.
>> I think the difference really is just
internally, my job it was a different sport,
working for a consumer company because people
weren't generally smarter than me around my technology.
In the consumer company.
But they are a lot smarter than me.
I am not the technical expert in the room at Nutanix.
All of them know more than I do.
>> No offense, but I'll bet.
>> That was a little intimidating.
I had to think twice, do I want to go back
to being in junior high?
>> Got to ask you, your journey.
17% of the IT industry's employment comprises women.
Just so happens that 17% of the guests on theCUBE are women.
We really try and go overboard on it.
>> Hard to find us.
>> There's a clear disparity
in pay, it's well-documented.
What was your journey to get here?
>> It's only now that I'm old and wise
and at a senior level that people
are making a big thing about me being female.
I've been female my entire career.
>> Never heard boo. >> I never traded on it.
I will tell you that throughout my career,
I have been given advice
that would seem ridiculous if it were given to a male.
As an example, I've been told
that I use too many words.
That I'm too emotional.
I've been told, can you imagine?
If I said, Hey Bob, could you button up
that top button of your shirt, there?
When you sit down, don't spread your legs
because I'm drawn to looking at
Girls, women, we get that advice
from senior advisors.
We're told, Be less emotional.
I've always ignored that advice.
I'm a mom, I have the blonde 1980's hair.
There's not much I can do about that.
Being genuinely myself,
it was all I could figure out how to be.
It just so happens that now I'm in my 50's
and I'm a CIO, so suddenly that's a thing.
It's never been a thing.
It's been something where my entire career,
I've had to just keep my own counsel
and be genuine and the fact that I'm female
and feminine and a mom, doesn't diminish
the fact that I'm also a brilliant technologist,
that I'm good at leading people.
I can feel empathy and care in my heart for a person,
at the same time that I'm firing them for non-performance.
I can be multifaceted.
I think that's women's superpower.
I think when we try to be just one thing
or we try to be more like the traditional male
in leadership, then it's like being Jerry Rice
and walking onto the field with your legs tied together.
My unfair advantage, to quote John Madden,
I got to use my unfair advantage.
My unfair advantage is that I think in a multifaceted way.
>> Wendy M., thanks so much for coming.
I'm glad we could make time for you,
I'm glad you could make time for us.
Thank you.
>> Thank you, appreciate it, it was fun.
>> Keep it right there, buddy.
We'll be back to wrap.
This is theCUBE in D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT.
Right back.