>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube,
Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center
in London, England,
where 3500 customers, partners, and employees
of Nutanix have gathered
for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018.
I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days
of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube
is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host.
Joep, I first met you two years ago
at the Nutanix show in Vienna.
Last year was in Nice.
We're now in London,
and now you're not just a guest, but a host.
Thanks so much for joinin' us.
>> Thank you.
So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer,
then I transitioned into a tech champion as well,
for getting to know the technology
and the people behind Nutanix,
and now I'm here as a co-host,
looking at Nutanix as a company.
>> Well, we really appreciate you joining us.
Give us, first of all, some more credibility
in the European space,
and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint.
So, you have been a customer,
you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has,
so you understand the technology.
We're going to get to talk to some of the customers,
some of those executives, and the like,
so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me,
and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube,
you're going to do one interview
in your native tongue of Dutch.
>> Yes, oh yeah.
It's going to be completely in Nederlands,
so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that.
>> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning,
and Dheeraj, masterful,
gives quite a good keynote,
talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old,
and so therefore he says still very young
when you look at most of the technology companies out there,
but they've come a long way.
I've watched Nutanix since the very early days,
and still kind of blows my mind.
Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy,
I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people.
Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people.
Pernixdata that Nutanix bought,
Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today,
introduced me to the company
when it was three people and a dog,
and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people,
announced last night
their Q 1 2019 earnings,
and some of the quick speeds would be
313 million dollars of revenue.
That is up 14% year over year for the quarter,
up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter.
Strong growth in a lot of the financials,
really moving strongly along their path to be software,
which is 51% of billings were from the software,
and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75%
in the next four to six quarters,
so aggressively meeting that,
and publicly traded company,
you kind of look at it and say
"Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar
market cap before the market opened today.
We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings."
What's just it that at a high level,
you've been watching Nutanix for a while,
so what's your take on the company?
>> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well.
I think they were 100 people big back then.
I learned from them from a technology perspective,
so I just got to know the technology,
got to know why they were building the startup,
building this technology,
and this was back in the day when it was
basically a VDI product,
and it was hardware.
It was a thin layer of software,
and they kept building that out,
and building it out.
At some point I became a customer of them,
when their appliances were becoming so mature,
that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting.
Ease of management, one click for everything,
and that made such a difference in the world back then,
that it's just so good to see them growing and growing
from the VDI product it was at some point,
all to where it is now.
This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company,
with a portfolio that's becoming very broad,
very deep as well.
So seeing them grow this quickly,
it's been pretty much amazing to see.
I haven't seen a company
go that fast in a long time.
>> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really,
if you look at where we are in technology today,
things move fast.
So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent,
and the amount of announcements
coming out of them is just staggering,
but we're going to talk here about Nutanix.
Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had,
considering as you said they started out,
really you think of that thin layer,
to really simplify IT.
Deeraj in the keynote talked about,
"We want to achieve invisible together."
was the line that he used,
and simplifying things are really tough.
That's really what characterized
the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind.
When I talk to users, why the bought it,
it was simplifying it.
It was not, when you think back to VMware,
VMware was real easy.
It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate.
I'm going to get high utilization.",
and there was a clear cost savings.
Well today, this hyperconverge is,
if you look at building it one way,
versus buying it this other way,
the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling.
It is the operational simplicity,
and therefore I can allow,
in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business,
and focus on things that add value to the business.
Move up the stack.
a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows
is "First, I want to modernize my platform,
and then I can do things like modernize my application,
modernize all my operations around that."
It's catalyst to help customers along their journey
for digital transformation.
Is that what you've seen?
>> Oh yeah, absolutely.
So looking at my own experience,
I've seen it so clearly that simplifying
that infrastructure later,
five, six years ago,
that was the driver for us to move there.
It's become so much more than just a simplification.
It's become a story of freeing up time
from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff.
Just like you said, saying yes to the business,
because infrastructure used to be hard.
It used to be difficult.
You'd need to spend a lot of time on it,
and now it's really so easy,
it's become a commodity.
You either get it from the cloud,
you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever,
and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel
to do value add stuff on top of it,
and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route.
They focused on the infrastructure part.
They're still an infrastructure company I think,
but they're expanding into
that whole journey the customer's going through as well.
I think we're going to here a lot more about
the hybrid strategy, about cloud,
about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that,
instead of just the infrastructure stuff.
>> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey
is definitely one that they talked about,
and let's talk about the way you look
at the Nutanix portfolio now.
The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave,
it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run.
So first, we have Core,
which really is the primary product
we've been thinking about,
it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use,
it's HCI, it's Prism,
it's those pieces to manage that Core piece.
Then, we add on top of that is Essentials,
which really looked at some of the expansion areas.
Files is one that they launched
as an announcement about two years ago
I believe it was,
that they have Blocks now,
which is now a highly scalable object model there,
and the Prism Pro,
so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core,
and then they have Enterprise,
which is is ICloud's kind of the branding
that they have along these,
but Leap is DR as a service.
They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service.
They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot
of other software solutions out there
that make up this whole portfolio.
I wouldn't say it was simple.
It took me two or three times of hearing it
before it started to crystallize,
but if you look out from that customer lens,
the customer doesn't need to worry about
where these buckets have,
it's the, you know,
"I'm buying Core stuff,
I'm probably growing to Essentials,
and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.",
and it's likely going to be a different go to market
and different buying motion.
Take something like Frame,
who we're going to have on the program today.
Frame today is not attached
to the Nutanix appliance itself,
it was born in the cloud,
and many of the enterprise solutions
are born in the cloud, multi-cloud.
So what's your take on how they're splitting up
and discussing the portfolio?
>> Just like you said,
it took me awhile to figure out
what that whole portfolio was,
you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff,
but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective,
it does make sense.
So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure.
Now they're simplifying the Essentials
in the data center as well,
like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring.
Those are topics that customers still
spend a lot of time on,
but they don't necessarily want to.
They want to have something
that is readily off the shelf,
it's easy to use, easy to expand upon,
so I do see Essentials as a good expansion
of that messaging that they have been
giving for quite a number of years already.
Simplifying what is already in the data center already,
and then the stretch into the cloud,
into the hyper-cloud,
delivering services that are still
so difficult to do yourself,
like take VDI for example.
That's still difficult.
Sending up an entire environment, managing it,
you have to have really specialized people
to do that for you, to do the do the design,
and being able to get that directly from the cloud
makes that so much easier.
So I do agree with the de-segmentation
into three big buckets,
and I do think customers are going
to respond positively to it.
>> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud,
that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot
about in the keynote this morning.
It's an area I want to poke and understand
a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix.
I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this,
and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times,
but hearin' a lot about Google.
Diane Greene on the stage,
I believe it was the D.C show,
I didn't see Google here.
I know there is updates as to where
the Google relationships are going.
They did mention Kubernetes.
The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has
is called Karbon.
I actually expect to see not only what we will have
Nutanix on the program here to talk about it,
but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon
in Seattle in two weeks.
Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have
on the program there.
Other than Kubernetes and how that fits
into the cloud native discussion,
I haven't heard a good cohesive message
as to Nutanix's hybrid,
they talk about how Nutanix
lives in a lot of environments,
and many of their products live in multi-cloud,
and there's some nuance there.
I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid.
Microsoft of course, and of course VMware
is the partnership with Amazon
is really the core of what they're doing there.
They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes.
They bought Heptio.
There are things going on there.
Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid.
We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid
when they talk about it.
Nutanix's messaging,
we're going to have Deeraj on today,
he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press,
but there's not a lot of people using it.
VMware on AWS gets a lot of press,
once again, not a lot of companies using it yet".
And while I agree,
customers actually feel comforted
by the message that they understand
how do I get from where I am today,
to where I need to go?
And of course I'm not saying
that everybody goes 100% public cloud.
The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks
like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least,
and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things.
What do you want to hear from Nutanix?
What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid,
but the message about where they're going with cloud
is I think what they want clarity on.
>> Yeah, I agree.
So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid,
they're calling it hyperconverged cloud,
which makes sense from their historical background.
I do think Nutanix has ways to go
in developing their own hybrid.
Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it,
like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing.
So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning
of this journey for themselves,
but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing,
or the small steps they're taking.
Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me.
I would never have thought Nutanix
would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix
is taking small steps in the right direction.
But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet.
Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now,
so they do still need a little bit of time for that.
>> Yeah, well Joep,
really appreciate you helpin' us break down this.
We've got two days of full coverage.
So much your goin' is that, right,
MNA in the space, it's a software world,
picking up pieces are easy,
heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard
for the last couple of years is
"will someone take Nutanix off the table?"
Not something I expect them to specifically direct,
but at a seven billion dollar market,
that would be a large acquisition,
but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years.
so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman,
stay with us for two days.
Wall to wall coverage.
Thecube.net is of course where to see
all of the live and on demand content.
Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube.
(contemplative music)