>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen Denmark, it's theCube.
Covering Nutanix.NEXT2019.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's
live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT.
We are here in Copenhagen, I'm your host Rebecca Knight,
co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Dheeraj Pandey.
He is the CEO and founder of Nutanix.
Thank you so much for returning to our program.
>> My pleasure. >> You're a Cube alum.
>> Thank you.
>> So I want to talk to you about
what we're here to do,
is celebrate ten years of Nutanix.
Ben Gibson when he was up there on the main stage,
he's the head of marketing.
He was talking about watching you backstage
saying that, "I saw in him a lot of pride and emotion".
Because this is really your baby.
You started ten years ago, there's been a lot
of nostalgia, bringing up some of your first employees.
And even a picture of you poised, with a ping pong ball
ready to play a little beer pong back in the early days.
>> Yup.
>> So talk a little bit about what this means to you
to be here ten years after you founded this company.
>> Yeah, first of all thank you so much
for the opportunity to come here.
It looks like an era.
Ten years is an era.
We've built a family of customers
and employees and partners.
And yet it feels like we haven't achieved a thing.
So you know, to me the more I make it look like
it's 2010 back again,
we can go back to being like a start up again
and you know growing from here.
Because you know growth is a very relative term you know.
It's a mindset thing.
And I think the new day and age
of multi cloud and what we have to do to virtualize
all these different silos that have emerged
and to virtualize, simplify and integrate.
You know, virtualize, simplify, integrate clouds
is going to be a journey of a lifetime actually.
>> Yeah, Dheeraj I think back to some
of our earliest discussions.
You know, you would bring us in in talking about
the challenge of our era is building software
for the distributed architecture that we need.
And that was as relevant in 2010 or 2012
as it is here in 2019.
HCI helps simplify that deployment of virtualization.
We are definitely at a point that we need to simplify cloud.
Cloud is here, it's growing.
The hybrid pieces are there so maybe bring us inside,
you know kind of, what's the same about the journey
and some of it is making one click upgrades
in today's environment is way more complex
than it would've been back when it was just an appliance.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
And I think about the whole concept of hyperconvergence.
Initially started out as converging computer with storage.
How to keep them close together
because machines need locality.
Applications need local data,
because the network is a real enemy.
And the same was true of human performance you know,
like lots of teams, lots of bureaucracy,
very little autonomy.
So when you brought data close to applications,
application people became autonomous you know,
they could do things on their own.
And that was the power of hyperconvergence.
You were able to provide performance to data
and machines and you're able to provide
performance to people because they became autonomous.
I think that is not changing even in the hyperscaler
data center environment.
and I think the fact
that you have to hop multiple switches
to get to data,
I think it's recreating the same problems
that we started out this company with, you know
almost ten years ago.
In fact if anything the hyperscaler networks
are worse than the networks that private clouds actually had
or even on-prem data centers had.
So keeping data close to applications is relevant
and it's fashionable one more time.
And the fact that you can provide that autonomy
to application folks to go launch their apps
in the public cloud through this new architecture
using the bare metal service offerings in the public cloud.
Where the bare metal offerings
look like HP Silver, or Dell Silver to us
I think it recreates the same.
So I think I am a big proponent
of the saying that says, the more things change,
the more they remain the same.
And they actually look very much the same as ten years ago.
>> So how do you think that,
describing the technological changes
that have taken place,
but really we're sort of back to where we started from.
But how would you describe the ways,
the differences in the ways that people work together?
Talking about the human beings
who are actually using this technology?
>> Well, for one this notion
of converging teams and people
is similar to the notion of converging machines you know,
hardware to pure software I think.
Whatever happened in our personal lives
with the iPhone and the Android OS,
is exactly what hyperconvergence did.
We had all these gadgets
and they were special purpose, single purpose gadgets.
And you made them as apps
and they were all together in this one, sort of device.
And then the device connected to cloud services.
I think that's what happened
in enterprise computing as well.
Computer storage, networking, security,
everything coming together as pure software,
running as apps.
And I think that has created the notion
of generalists in IT as well.
Because as IT matures, you can't have so many specialists.
Just like in healthcare,
you can't have so many specialist doctors,
when you need like a ton of primary care physicians
and generalist practitioners like you do.
And that's what IT is going through as well.
>> And so that's changing the skills that are in demand too,
from employers because you are looking
for people who are sort of a mile wide and an inch deep.
>> Yeah and in fact the inch deep
is actually not a pejorative.
I would say that it's a good thing because
with automation and a lot of layering of software
you don't need to get deeper into the details,
the weeds, especially in infrastructure computing.
Because you know, what's our mission is
to really elevate IT to go figure out things
that really matter to the business.
Which is applications and services
as opposed to going and stitching together stuff
that really can be done with pure software
and a standardization you know.
A level of standardization that operating models can bring
with commodity servers and pure software.
So let people go and do things
that really are more relevant in this age actually.
>> Was wondering if the close of the keynote
there was discussion of the tech preview of Zyclusters.
You and I have spoken a little bit off camera
about this, but there is a lot of interest out there,
everything, when Azure first announced Azure Stack,
it got everyone excited.
To be honest, Rebecca and I were
at one of the Microsoft shows last year
and most of the attendees weren't really talking about it.
So it's that kind of the buzz versus
the reality of what customers are actually using.
Where do you see, where are we
with kind of that hybrid discussion?
And why is Nutanix taking a slightly different approach
than some of the others out there?
>> Yeah I mean this hybrid cloud
is another word for hyperconverged clouds.
And whatever HCI was in 2010 is what hybrid is today.
So, imagine ten years from 2010
we are still talking about HCI.
Especially in the large enterprises
they won't barely begun to say
look private cloud equals HCI.
I think that's been a sort of epiphany moment
for most of the CIO's of the Global 2000 companies.
Just in the last three years,
you've been talking about it for ten years now.
So there is a bell curve of technology adoption.
We are in the very early stages
of what hyperconverged clouds would mean
or what hybrid cloud should mean.
I think doing it right is important
because the market is large.
The ability to really move applications and infrastructure,
I call them apps now, the hypervisor is now an app.
Because it can run in the Amazon platform.
It can run in the Azure Platform.
And that platform that they provide is billing, identity,
recommendations and things of that nature.
So on top of that platform how do you go
and put your app in the catalog?
I think that's the overall sort of metaphor that I use.
So in that sense I don't look
at the platform as a zero sum game for us.
We just have to look at it as a platform
where our apps can actually go and run.
>> Dheeraj, how does a company, you've grown quite a bit
but if you look at the overall market
you're still a small player
compared to a Microsoft, Cisco, or a Google out there.
So we definitely think you have that opportunity
to help simplify that cloud,
hyperconvergence cloud experience as you said.
But how does Nutanix get there?
>> Yeah I think you know, and I say this
to people who followed virtualization,
the history of virtualization.
When Viamer was building virtualization
some of the market was 55 billion dollars.
Storage was 30 billion.
Networking was 25 billion.
Another 110 billion dollar market.
When they went to 4 billion dollars,
they just had to think about
what does it mean to put a layer of
software on top of all this stuff?
So people can drag and drop experience
from one server to another, from one storage array
to another and so on.
So there's enough value to add, on top of that
110 billion with their own 4 billion in 2012,
they were a 4 billion dollar company, actually you know.
Right now we are thinking about, okay these things
are the new platform.
Where is the value in going and virtualizing, simplifying
and integrating them all with a layer of software?
That becomes a new integration software
for all things multi cloud.
>> So it's interesting.
Want to connect the dots with that to Nutanix
has been going through it's own transformation.
And you've talked publicly a lot about
you sit on the board of Adobe, that move from software
subscriptions challenging.
What I want to understand is,
what does that end result of these subscription model,
what does that mean for your customers
and how they can change that relationship.
>> I talked about this in my keynote as well.
The why of subscription.
I think the very fact that we've decoupled
the entitlement from hardware
was the first change for us, you know.
The fact that software can live anywhere.
And on top of that, what subscription delivers
is this notion of residual value, where you can say
look if I have unused products and unused terms
on some of these products,
can I use them for other things actually?
So it provides a very agile procurement framework
that is very new to the world of infrastructure actually.
And you have a ton of shelfware
in infrastructure in general.
And on-prem software in general,
even in the public cloud there's a lot of shelfware too.
I think the ability to really go and repurpose stuff
for new things that you want to buy provides
a lot of optionality to our customers.
Subscription is also about bite-sizing things
so you don't have to buy big things.
And delivering it in real time.
So I think you'll see more and more
of consumption model change toward subscription
in the coming years.
>> In talking about the value of Nutanix
in this multi cloud world,
and you're talking about how customers
really want that optionality.
We're here in Copenhagen, how would you say
the U.S. customers are different from the European customers
in terms of what they're looking for?
Or are they different?
>> You know, they're very similar,
because there's a ton of global companies out there
who have local offices and such.
And so the Global 2000 has tentacles everywhere.
I think in some ways where they do differ
is when it comes to the partner community
and the channel, the system integrators,
they're actually more influential here in Europe
and Asia-Pacific than in the U.S.
Because most of talent in the U.S. goes
and work for companies like us.
And most of the talent in Europe and Asia-Pacific,
they work for the channel and the system integrators.
So how we actually work with them and learn from them
and educate them on the transformation,
I think is basically the only thing that's different.
>> All right, Dheeraj, one of the feedback
I got from customers is something that I hear
at the Amazon show.
I'm inundated with so much new stuff, you know.
I can't keep up with it.
I want you to explain a little bit,
kind of the portfolio and also if you can
just organizationally how you think of this.
You know when we hear Amazon does
their two pizza teams and they scale is very different
from a traditional software infrastructure company.
So--
>> Yeah, it's a great point and one of my favorite
sort of things to think about these days
is how do you not sell things, but sell an experience?
It's very, very important to differentiate the two.
Cause you can build a kind of things
and theN the question is
if you've left the integration as an exercise
to the reader or to the customer
and you're basically telling them,
look you can add well by best of breed
from other companies that integrated on your own.
So the job of integration
and to really sell an experience is
has to left to shifted to companies like us.
And that's what we've been doing with our products.
We're really bringing them together.
When you say, all together now,
it's also about our products, actually.
It's the portfolio around data,
making sure that we are really bringing them all together.
They can leverage each other.
One sits on top of the other.
One pairs to the other.
They can share common policy, policy engines
and things like that.
I mean, what we're doing with security for example.
Is bringing multi cloud with the old world
of microsegmentation actually.
There's a lot of integration that's going on,
yet we want to provide each of these GM's autonomy
because at some level, they are all looking
for individual use cases in workloads.
And they're looking for mastery,
which is like, how do I master
what I do well with my customers?
But in the purpose has to be more than their own, actually.
You think about autonomy, mastery, purpose.
One of Dan Finks philosophy of motivation.
Are general managers motivated if you give them AMP,
you know, autonomy, mastery and purpose.
But at the end of it the purpose is customer driven.
It's not driven by product, it's driven by customers.
It's driven by customer's experience
rather than the general manager's things,
they're actually building for customers.
>> Yeah, just one follow-up.
When I think about one of the challenges
I hear inside customers,
and I thought we'd made more progress is,
there's still a lot of silos.
I talked to customers that are like, well
I've deployed Nutanix and I love it but,
there's this group over here
and they're doing something different
and they're certified or they're starting to use it
or oh, my god, this developer team spun something up
and they didn't pay any attention.
So IT was supposed to get everything back under control
and manage it and work with the business,
but I feel like the customers haven't made a lot
of progress on that journey in the last 10 years.
What's your feedback from customers
and how we're doing? >> Yeah, that's very true.
I think that what you just said is
also about autonomy for the developers
and autonomy for that other team and such.
So you can't force fit everything into single-size,
this one size fits all kind of philosophy.
That's why there's a bell curve of adoption
you know, any technology.
I mean even today, if you think of the hyperscalers,
you might think that they have it all.
They have two percent of the market.
And that's how big this market really is.
So I think going back to understanding
that each of these groups actually
has skill sets that are different.
They're used to doing things a certain way.
And unless you go and weave it with them.
What I tell people is you got to walk
to where the customer is before you walk with them,
to where you want them to be actually.
So walking to where the customer is,
is about going to the private cloud,
we could easily have said, look, let's banish all this.
Let's build everything and then off-prem cloud
service 10 years ago.
But they said the market is not there yet.
Similarly we said, we got to build up line sales,
because right now the white walks market
is not there yet for the enterprise you know.
Then when we came out of it we said, look the market
is already there, let's walk with them
as pure software, now subscription.
We did the same with the online virtualization software
below Nutanix and said, let's walk to where
the customer is.
Let's run on top of (mumbled) if that's what it takes.
And then walk with them to where we want them to be.
Which is an invisible eye proviser and such.
So I think we've got to keep doing this
where let's remove the hubris
from innovation in Silicon Valley
and the lot of hubris about these things that we hold on.
I think when you try to go and understand
and have the empathy for the customer
is when magical things happening.
>> A fantastic note to end on.
Dheeraj, thank you so much for coming back on theCube.
>> Thank you.
It's always a pleasure talking to you.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman
Stay tuned for more from Nutanix.NEXT.
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