>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE.
Covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back, everyone,
to theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT here in Copenhagen.
We're, of course, here at the Nutanix show.
We're wrapping up a fantastic two-day show.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
been co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Simon Taylor.
He is the CEO of Haiku, a good friend of theCUBE.
Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
>> Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here!
It's great to see you guys again.
>> And you're our final guest so--
>> Oh my gosh! >> It's a very good--
>> I'll try to stay interesting.
>> No pressure, Simon. (laughing)
>> Keep your energy up. >> Yes.
>> So, for our viewers who are not as familiar with Haiku,
tell us a little bit about your business,
and how you are a strategic partner of Nutanix.
>> Sure, sure, so Haiku actually is a software company
that focuses on data protection as a service.
We actually started by spinning out
of a much larger company called Comtrade
that had about 1,000 engineers,
it was doing all sorts of things.
But they had an amazing talent for building
backup and recovery software.
My vision was really that we could move up the value chain,
and we could establish ourselves as our own brand,
as long as we could find a place in the market
that was fast-growing, building like a rocket ship,
and was really requiring a new
kind of data protection and backup.
And honestly, as soon as we fell--
We saw Nutanix, we sort of fell in love.
We realized that, you know, they had developed
an entirely new category of business with hyper-converged,
and they were really a pioneer in that space.
So we said, why don't we build the world's first
purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix?
And that's exactly what we did.
And I think, you know, Stu was actually
one of the first people to ever hear about it.
We came on theCUBE and we talked about that,
and we GAed that in 2017, in July, I think at that .NEXT.
So, just two and a half years later,
we now have 1200 customers,
and we're in 62 countries around the world.
So it's been absolutely astonishing,
it's been wonderful growth, we're seeing
300% year-over-year growth, and really a lot of that
is just based on our ability to protect the data
of Nutanix customers around the world.
>> Well, and Simon, right, that early question was,
is Nutanix going to be big enough to support
ISV's that, you know,
can grow their business underneath them?
Before we get further and talk about mine and everything--
>> Sure. >> Give us a little bit,
you know, the state of the state for Haiku because--
Started with Nutanix, but that's not the only solution
that you're offering today.
So just give us the snapshot
of the whole business if you would.
I think what we realized, Stu,
as we were building out Haiku, and this purpose-built
backup and recovery for Nutanix,
we said, that's the on-prem.
But there's a lot of on-prem that is still
legacy three-tier architecture,
so we added a VMware product,
but really, the goal was to offer true multicloud
data protection as a service.
So what we did is we built the independent
purpose-built backup and recovery service
for Nutanix, one for VMware.
Then we built the world's first
purpose-built backup as a service for Google Cloud,
and I'm really thrilled to announce
that, next month, we're launching Azure Backup as well.
And the brilliant thing about our system
and our solution is that we actually enable customers
to not only back up their data independently for that cloud,
but to then migrate their data
to whatever other cloud they want to use.
So it actually becomes data protection as a service,
data migration, and DR.
>> So, for customers, this is wonderful,
but how is it to be strategic partners
with all of these big players?
>> Oh yeah, absolutely.
I think you have to place your bets, right?
So if you noticed, I didn't say AWS.
And almost every company that I talk to says:
why wouldn't you start with AWS?
They're the biggest.
That's never been our philosophy.
I think the fact that we attached ourselves
to Nutanix so early,
not just because they were a rocket ship on fire,
but also because we truly believed in their vision.
We believe in the Nutanix products,
we love Dheeraj's entire philosophy
around simplicity and customer delight,
and we felt like we could be students of Nutanix.
We could actually build out our product
with those same philosophies and principles in mind.
So I think, really going deep with Nutanix
is number one for us and remains number one.
I would also say, though,
that Google's been an excellent partner,
Microsoft's been an excellent partner,
so with the large cloud providers,
you have to take a different approach.
You cannot offer a downloadable products, right?
All of our public cloud backup and recovery
is a true managed service.
You go into their app store, you turn it on
rather than download it, you configure,
and you're able to perform all your backup
and do all your recovery right from the console.
>> All right, so Simon, let's get into
the guts of what's happening at Nutanix.
Mine, of course, has a partnership
to extend for data protection,
partnering with Veeam and Haiku as the first two partners.
The other thing that everybody's
pretty excited about is Xi Clusters.
And that sounds like--
And we've talked to Nutanix people.
As Nutanix brings their stack into the clouds,
not just on the clouds,
will that pull things like mine along with them?
And so give us what you're seeing
with mine first and maybe Xi Clusters along.
>> Yeah, so maybe we start with mine,
this whole concept that I think
that these guys have pioneered,
and they've done a really terrific job of it.
I think that the vision there,
and I count Mark Niedermeyer in this group
and Tim Isaacs and some wonderful folks
on the product team in Nutanix.
Their vision was, there's Rubrik and there's Cohesity,
and there's these large secondary storage platforms.
Personally, when I look at them,
what I see is Nutanix with a backup workload.
And I think that Nutanix, being the original, is the best.
It's the most complete solution
and it's very, very comprehensive.
So I think the Nutanix folks understood this intuitively
and their idea was, instead of us building our own backup
and going after that space,
we've got amazing partners like Haiku.
Why don't we just natively integrate them
into the mine platform and offer
that secondary storage workload
as a key part of Nutanix's product proposition?
So the really exciting thing for us
is that we are skewed up with Nutanix.
Nutanix will be able to resell Haiku as a part of mine,
and I think that's going to really complete
their entire story when it comes to being able
to own the data center and, really,
own that sort of cloud in general.
So I think your second question, Stu, was about clusters.
And I think the answer there is very simple.
Multi-clustering, it has become extremely important
for Nutanix customers.
They've done a great job of going after that.
The simple fact is, if you don't support Xi Clusters
as a backup vendor, you really can't compete in this market.
So I'm really thrilled to announce, of course,
that Haiku is the first backup and recovery vendor
that does support Xi Clusters.
>> Okay, so interesting.
You talked about how you hand down a solution for AWS.
Sounds like this might be a path for you
to get with Nutanix onto AWS.
>> Absolutely, and again, for us,
it's not about looking for some Trojan horse
or back door into a go-to-market strategy.
It's about making sure that the customers
are truly delighted by the value that we provide.
And I think that, when we go after a specific market,
we want to do it the best.
So we don't go shallow and just check the box.
We want to make sure, for example, when we build out Azure,
that we're not just dealing with the general principle
of backing up and keeping things consistent.
We want to make sure the applications
people are running on Azure are supported by Haiku.
That's what we do with Nutanix, that's what we do with GCP.
We want to always go as deep as possible
so we can really complement the platform
in a really, really comprehensive way.
>> One of the things you said earlier
was that your philosophy is very much aligned with Nutanix:
your end goal to simplify and delight the customer.
This is much more intuitive in user interface.
So talk a little bit about how you,
you said you wanted to become a student of Nutanix.
This cross-company learning is very interesting to me.
>> Yeah, it's rare (chuckles). >> What have you learned?
What have you learned and how do you go about
being tutored by your customer?
>> So, you know, I'm a very visual guy
and, whenever I think about Nutanix,
I always had this image in my head.
Whenever I thought about legacy three-tier architecture
and the move to hyper-converged, rather,
I always pictured an '80's stereo system.
Remember those big '80's boxes
and they have all the graphic equalizers
all the way down?
And some kid would come and push them all down.
You could never reset the darn things.
And then along comes automation
and, suddenly, you press a button and you listen to jazz
and it sounds like good jazz,
and the treble and the bass all fix themselves.
I effectively think that Nutanix
brought that same concept, funnily enough,
into the data center.
They simplified so much that was impossible to handle
for admins across the world.
They made it so simple to use their product
that, actually, the customers could start
to enjoy their work more.
And I really love that.
That's a true, that's really an intangible
sort of value proposition
that I think people don't talk about enough.
Yes, you want to save time.
Yes, you want to save money.
But if you can enjoy your job more
as a result of getting a product, what's better than that?
So I think that philosophy is something
we baked into Haiku in the following ways.
The first is, when we were designing the UI,
we wanted it to look and feel
like the platform it supports.
So, when you use Haiku for Nutanix, it looks like prism.
When you are using our console for GCP,
you're going to feel like you're using GCP.
The idea is that backup and recovery
should be an extension of that cloud,
expression, that platform,
so that a customer who is an expert with that platform
can easily manage those with no training at all.
So, again, driving that simplicity
right there into the platform.
>> Yeah, so Simon, you know, one of the things we love to do
is hear from customers and what they're doing.
Of course, you've got 1200 customers
that are Nutanix customers,
so we'd love to hear any insights you have
and a lot of discussion about AHV
in the last 12 months has been
about half of the deployments there.
Anything around AHV or any of the new software features
and products and experiences that Nutanix has been launching
that you hear customers buzzing and talking to you about.
>> Sure, the first thing I would say
is it is truly a multicloud world now.
I think that legacy vendors are having
a harder and harder time coping with the fact
that cloud watching no longer works.
If you show up to the market and you say,
oh, now I can deploy an agent into this cloud,
it's sort of: stop, stop (chuckles).
Don't say agent around me.
So I think the ability to really natively integrate
into any of these clouds
and support all of these clouds equally is key.
So in the past, a vendor would start
with one thing and it would be great.
And I won't use names here,
but then they would do something else.
They might move to another hypervisor
and it was a little bit less great.
And I think that that notion has to change
in a multicloud world,
which brings me to the concept of AHV.
I think that AHV has really grown.
I mean I would say that, right now,
over half of our customers are AHV customers,
and I would say that that grows every single quarter.
And it not only grows in terms of net new logos,
it also grows in terms of existing customers
that want to switch to AHV and they want to switch fast.
They don't want to pay the vTax anymore,
but more than that, I think they're seeing AHV
as a really robust enterprise hypervisor
that really meets the complete need for the customer.
And I think that's been terrific to watch.
>> So, here, at .NEXT, this is not your first .NEXT,
but what kinds of conversations are you having?
What's been interesting to you?
What are you going to take back to Haiku,
when you head back to Brookline?
>> Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's all the new stuff.
I mean Kubernetes, containers,
I think these are all things
we've been working on for some time.
We'll have some surprises for you guys in Q4,
the end of Q4, around that.
But I think the big takeaway for me is
we spent the first two years building our brand,
getting the word out there,
proving to companies and customers around the world
that we were truly enterprise-ready,
'cause we're the new kid on the block
and you have to start somewhere and show that.
I think, now, we added physical last year,
we added tape support,
we've really got all of the major applications
covered at this point.
I think that conversation, we've checked the box.
So today's conversations are about what's next.
How much more deeply will you integrate with Nutanix?
How can I use Nutanix to then manage my data
in the cloud and bring it back again?
And can Haiku support that or will it distract me?
And the simple answer is it will support that completely
because it's so natively integrated.
And, again, I think, when you choose a platform
at this stage and this is something we've seen
again, again, again, people do not want a second silo
in order to run their backup and recovery.
Customers who are choosing Nutanix
or are choosing any platform want to run that platform
and they want to make that one holistic experience.
They want to reduce the training required
and they want to make sure they get the most
out of their investment.
So I think, two or three years ago, Stu, when we first met,
everybody was trying new things.
It was sort of, there were all these new platforms,
it was all very exciting.
I think, now, people are doubling, tripling,
quadrupling down on the platforms
they fundamentally believe in.
And we're thrilled about that
because we support those platforms
and will continue to do so.
>> Great, excellent.
Well, Simon, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
It was a real pleasure talking to you and--
>> It's been great. >> Yes, I know, absolutely.
Thank you very much.
>> Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
>> That wraps up two brilliant days in Copenhagen
at the Bella Center at Nutanix .NEXT.
Thank you so much for joining us
and we hope to see you next time.
(upbeat electronic music)