>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California,
it's the CUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to the CUBES's live coverage
of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim California.
I'm your host Rebecca Knight,
along with my co-host John Furrier,
and we are kicking off a two day show here in Anaheim.
I'm so happy to be working with you, John.
>> Awesome to see you.
Great event, Nutanix, hot, innovative company,
under a lot of pressure from VMWare.
But this marketplace is changing, great transition,
opportunity for these guys, so it's gonna be fun.
>> Exactly, and I really wanna get into
what we heard on the main stage.
We had Dheeraj Pandey up there, talking about Nutanix.
It's a very poignant moment for him,
because Nutanix is turning 10 this year.
That is a milestone in and of itself.
This company has really changed so much.
It's always been about simplifying data management,
but it's no longer a one-product company.
I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit
on the changes you've seen.
>> It's been a fun ride.
I've known Dheeraj for 10 years,
when we first interviewed him, when they were misunderstood.
No one really got what this HCI was going on,
Stu Miniman was early to see it (mumbles),
but it was, for a few years, it was like,
Oh, he's crazy, entrepreneur,
but he ended up having the right formula.
Very innovative company,
they have a great product leadership, great engineering,
but 10 years old, they went public.
So they're out in the open, Dell Technologies went private,
reset everything, then went public,
kind of forced to go public, and is doing great.
So you have an interesting dynamic.
The company's 10 years old, they went public,
and they had to make all these moves out in the open.
So the interesting thing at 10 years old for them
is that they got a great business
and the market's in transition.
Hyperconvergence, HCI as it's called,
is a solid foundation, but it's changing very radically
with the cloud technologies and multi-cloud
and the enterprises morphing into,
right into their wheelhouse with the simplicity needed,
there's integration needed,
all these new opportunities are emerging,
and they're still small, so they can be nimble.
This is the challenge that they have.
They have to get out in front of this next wave.
If they don't, it's gonna be competitive pressure,
and I think that's the big story that I'm seeing here is,
they're 10 years old, they're not resting on their laurels,
the CEO's aggressive, he's taking on VMWare a little bit,
and so he's competitive.
So we'll see what happens.
>> And you said Dheeraj is a friend of the CUBE.
So let's talk about his leadership style.
So here's this company that was a tech startup.
It now has a market cap in the multiple billions of dollars,
recently gone public.
How would you describe his leadership style,
and also how it's changed since it was
sort of a little tech startup?
>> Well, Dheeraj had always been an innovator,
he's been a visionary.
Again, he sees typical founding.
He's got the 20-mile stare, as I call it,
he can see around the corner,
but that's not gonna get him
through this competitive battle.
He's got to balance the visionary competitiveness
and strategy with tactical execution.
They need to execute right now
because they're under a lot of pressure,
competitive pressure.
They need to increase their sales inside the enterprise
to get new logos and new customers.
So I think what I'm seeing from his leadership style is,
it's a call to arms within the company, saying,
We gotta go take territory down, we gotta compete,
not necessarily on a head-on, with say VMWare and others,
but they gotta continue to innovate and be competitive.
That's very tactical,
and that's something that came out
of the analyst meeting yesterday that I noticed was,
he's very tactical, he's painting the picture,
but he's got a great vision,
and I think that's gonna be the challenge.
>> I wanna talk about partners.
Who are sort of the key partners
that you think will help this company grow,
because it does take a village.
>> Well, the interesting strategy that Nutanix is looking at
in my opinion is, again this is my opinion,
but they have a partnering strategy.
Dell Technologies and VMWare,
it's all part of a portfolio of end-to-end strategies,
so really the big competitor for Nutanix is gonna be Dell,
Dell Technologies and their family of companies.
Nutanix is going after more of a partnering strategy.
They announced a key partnership
with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, HPE,
who's also a competitor in the HCI space.
So they got to create this ecosystem strategy,
and it's gonna be about partners.
And if Nutanix can integrate with other players,
they could be a supplier of IT technology
for the broader market.
This is something that's interesting.
Everybody's trying to be a broker,
or they use the term gateway
to the multi-cloud or cloud broker.
I mean all these terms have been kicked around,
but Nutanix truly has an opportunity
to take their product leadership and be a partner
and tie things together more elegantly than say,
one company end-to-end.
>> Let's talk also about Nutanix the business.
As you've said multiple times,
this is a hugely competitive industry.
This company is under a lot of pressure.
Tactically, they've gotta be tough,
but yet they've also, they're still small,
they can be nimble and innovative.
What is sort of on Dheeraj's to-do list
from you speaking as an analyst?
>> Well, I think the number one thing,
I think he's really gotta shore up the sales
and marketing effort of it, because they have,
when they compete in the marketplace,
they need more competitive wins.
The stock has taken a little bit of a hit lately
on just some basic fundamentals.
Again, I still think they're misunderstood in the market,
and that's a big upside for Nutanix.
But they've gotta win more competitive deals.
Where they compete with a concept known as a POC,
they win most of the time.
They gotta take their product leadership
and they gotta win in the field.
And this is a critical thing and lower their cost
of acquisition for customers.
That's a key kind of financial analysis.
The other thing that they gotta do
is continue to get the product leadership
and get position for that next wave.
That's gonna be enterprise and multi-cloud,
and that's not yet clear.
And the numbers don't look that strong
in my opinion on the growth.
No one's really got visibility
into what those numbers are gonna look like.
In their core business, their HCI business, they're solid.
So they gotta build on that, extend out that base,
and that's really the core strategy.
>> How would you describe the customer mindset,
because as you said, this is a company that's misunderstood.
They get it and they're sort of waiting
for the customers to catch up,
or waiting for the market, really, to catch up.
>> The customer angle is interesting because,
a lot of people that like Nutanix are coming from VMWare,
where they pay licenses and VMWare had some misfires
a couple of years ago on product.
They kind of caught back up and shored that up,
but that opened up a door for Nutanix.
VMWare 6.0 has been talked about as one of those gaps where,
opened up the door to Nutanix,
so VMWare customers are kind of looking at Nutanix.
I think the HBE relationship's interesting
because I think that's gonna be
a whole new set of customer base.
But the customer mindset right now is interesting.
They wanna not consolidate.
They wanna actually reduce the pay points
around dealing with all this legacy hardware,
legacy software, and I think Nutanix is positioned
to come in and say, We can provide an integrated solution,
reduce your footprint, give you more capabilities
and free up the time it takes to manage IT.
And I think that's one of the consistent themes.
The other notable thing I noticed and other customer base is
it's a lot younger and smarter technical people
where they don't have that dogma of
this is the way we used to do it.
And I think that's gonna be
an interesting devopps opportunity,
where the younger generation in IT would be like,
Why are we doing this versus this?
I think that's gonna be very interesting
to see if that network effect for Nutanix will work.
>> Well, I'm interested to hear you talk
about this younger generation in relation to the customers,
because Nutanix is also a younger generation,
you know, it's 10 years old,
it's sort of on the verge of adolescence,
and we were just at Dell EMC World.
That company's turning 35 next week.
Obviously, Microsoft and Apple are well into their 40s.
How would you talk about this company in terms of it
as part of the new generation of tech companies,
tech powerhouses, really?
>> Well, I think it's a contrast between two styles.
Michael Dell is awesome,
and what he's putting out there
is an end-to-end strategy for Dell.
They wanna automate,
they wanna own the infrastructure layer,
and they wanna be the preferred supplier for IT.
Nutanix is a little bit different.
They're younger, they're faster, they're nimble,
and they're taking a more integrated approach
and a partnership-centric approach.
So I think the style is one of a cheetah
who's running fast, that's Nutanix,
and then the big elephant which is Dell,
and they're just pounding through the territory.
The Dell Technologies and VMWare have more muscle.
So they're gonna have some good wins there.
Nutanix is gonna stay fast and nimble
and just kind of bob and weave off of What Dell's doing.
So I think that's the opportunity for them
is to go to the next level, and I think Dheeraj sees that,
but the question I see is because they're a public company,
they gotta balance this all out in the open.
And they're a very transparent company,
so I don't think it's gonna be too hard of a challenge,
but this is what they have to do.
They gotta really take that revenue up in the cloud
and enterprise beyond HCI.
>> And Wall Street is watching.
>> Yeah, and Wall Street is watching.
>> So we have a great show.
We have, we're gonna be talking products,
we're gonna be talking women in tech, social impacts,
research, for our viewers at home,
what do you think that they should be looking for
in terms of Nutanix and its journey?
>> I think that I would look for
and what I'm gonna be poking at in the interviews
is what's next, because I think this is a critical bet
for Dheeraj and the team was are they on the right wave,
is this what the customers want,
what kind of product leadership they have,
and then what's the culture fit for what the customers want?
And the customers are looking for simplicity,
they wanna reduce their cost of ownership,
and they want a supply that's gonna be around.
So I think the key thing is look for where it goes next.
That's where I think the number one thing to look for.
>> Well, John, I'm looking forward
to two days of coverage with you.
I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier.
We will have much more of the CUBE's live coverage
of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California.
Stay with us.
(electronic music jungle)