>> 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, I'm your host Rebecca Knight
along with my co-host Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Sammy Zoghlami.
He is the SVP Sales Europe Nutanix,
and Sylvan Siou, he is the Senior Director Systems Engineer
for EMEA at Nutanix.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
For you for returning and this is your first time Sammy.
>> First time absolutely.
>> Well, I want to start with you.
You were on the main stage this morning
and you were describing being one of the first
few employees in France, working out of hotel lobbies,
keeping all the promotional materials in your house
and people not even knowing how to pronounce Nutanix.
Now here you are.
For you, six years later, describe a little bit
what this journey has been like for you,
being at Nutanix.
>> Well this journey, is a successful journey obviously,
where we started from scratch in EMEA,
where we built a lot of relationships with the channel.
We started to involve first stories with customers
and you know the only thing we could not forecast
was the speed of growth and if you told me six years ago
that we would be four and a half thousand, you know,
in this conference I wouldn't have believed it.
I think the overall journey is an accelerated
journey of development, that we have.
>> Sammy, bring us inside a little bit about you know,
we sometimes call it nation building, but you know
the channel of course, very important.
Talk about some of the challenges
and some of the successes to what has made Nutanix
so successful in your time.
>> Yeah, I think the technology is for sure a big element
in this, it is solving business problems,
but when you think of it there's many stories
of great technologies that didn't make it
or didn't make it big.
So I think the openness of this company from day one
to work with partners, to work with an ecosystem
of alliance partners.
We were also very open to share
how the Nutanix technology is built and is working.
So there's a lot of openness around how this works,
it's not a black-box and we integrate with the ecosystem.
So for our positioning,
which is mainly initially the data center,
the large environments,
we have to integrate into customer environment,
we have to integrate with existing technologies,
and the fact that we are open from day one,
and we keep that line, is helping a lot in the attraction.
>> I want to get into that strategy in a little bit,
but I want to bring you into this conversation too,
Sylvain, and just have you talk a little bit about
what you're seeing in the competitive landscaping.
What are some of the things that Nutanix needs to focus on
because the competitors are really edging in?
>> We are more focused to deliver our vision
and continue to build the pieces
of our steel door construction right now,
and to be back on question about the partners,
the adoption also confers from the partners
before the customers and really working with them,
engaging with them was the reason of the success.
It was not just signing contract (mumbles) them,
but really engaging with them, at customer sites,
and as soon as they see the reaction of the consumer,
they completely believe in it and we scaled very fast
because of them.
>> Yeah, I'm wondering if I can get both of your comments.
Talk about the competition for talent also
when you talk now Nutanix over 5,000,
the channel is very strong,
it makes it a little bit tougher to pull those pieces in
if you're Silicon Valley, oh there's this start-up
I want to join, things like that, but have to imagine
things are a little bit different in EMEA.
>> I would say, well, competition for talents
is definitely here in EMEA.
Especially on the topics that we are tackling,
in the cloud, the dev ops, big data et cetera.
Now, we are an attractive brand,
there's demonstrated paths of development for employees
so I think on top of being a successful company,
we have a lot of proof points of building careers
so people want to join for the fun, for the success
but also to build a fast career, that helps.
Now, saying that, it's still not an easy task.
You know there's, especially the volume of work
that we are doing, so we have organized ourselves very well
to onboard people, enable people and maybe be in a position
to hire people that don't have all the skills
but have the right DNA
and then we can always teach the skills.
That's the way we are organized today.
>> And on a technical side, all the users produce IT vendor,
let's say was looking for specialist of complexity,
you know, where is the behind the scene,
and we are in different situation
meaning that we can start small first
and we talk about the project of the customer
and until this project it works, we cannot move forward.
We cannot upsell, so our situation is more consultative,
being a trusted advisor of what they are trying to achieve
and not anymore on what we're trying to build on our side.
>> That's a very important point.
The mindset of successful employees
are the ones that are focused on the outcomes.
They're not here to sell a product, they focus on project
and the outcome of customers.
>> So how do you find that person when you're interviewing
your pool of applicants, I mean,
that is such an important part of the culture here,
this people first attitude and really,
being all hands on deck if a customer has an issue.
So how do you know when you're interviewing someone
that they have got the right DNA to be here?
>> Well, first we know before they join the interview
because we are well connected on the market
and we have sources of information about how they operate
on day to day, now of course, experience of hiring
so many people over the years helps,
and there's a lot of small (mumbles),
we can notice in our recruitment process,
I think we've gone very professional in the way we recruit.
We still have a lot of referrals as well
from employees, which helps, in terms of making sure
we're hiring the right DNA, but we want to diversify.
We don't want people coming from the same background,
we're doing a pretty good job on diversity on every topic,
you know, gender, ethnicity, background,
this is a pretty good success.
>> So Sammy, you've got a new role.
Give us a little bit of insight as to your vision,
what we should expect to see as a strategy
for Nutanix and EMEA.
>> I would say first, it's three months on the job
and I have no intent to break anything that works.
I think there's a successful recipe in EMEA,
which is a legacy of Chris Kaddaras,
lots of good methodologies,
lots of good principles of working,
no intention to change that,
maybe the phase after that for EMEA,
but for the whole company, is to focus on our strength
and we see that all technology is well suited
for mission critical environment,
is well suited for strategic projects for customers
and maybe we should become the default vendor
that you think about when you go for
mission critical projects and transformation.
I think today we do a very broad set
of projects with customers.
Tomorrow I would like customers to think first
about Nutanix when they think about something
that is critical to their business.
And in the same way for partners, if we can move
from being a vendor with high growth, great margin,
to a vendor that is helping them transform their business
model or the way they attack different segments,
then we will have achieved a good phase two.
>> What do you see here as the biggest challenges?
Basically right now.
>> Well, the biggest challenge is insight clearly,
it's growth.
We see that in every area, every time we grow, fast,
then suddenly you need to change organization processes,
your principle of working and you need to reassess yourself
and your way of doing things, even on a personal level,
that's the biggest challenge.
I think if we are not constantly paranoid
about reassessing that, growth can break a lot of quality,
in the relationship with customers but also in our velocity.
>> I wonder if you can bring us inside
the customers a little bit.
What are some of the key roles that you find
and where does Nutanix have the best engagement with
and strategically, where would Nutanix maybe change
over time where they're engaging with the customer?
>> So now there is no more question about the fact
that part of the IT will be in the cloud,
part would be internally, some people will go
more one side or the other side,
because Nutanix have both technology on both side,
we can take care of old school application
and be sure that can still run in the cloud
and on the other side, if you develop an application
totally distribute it and so on,
meaning a clonative, we can run it on Nutanix
and all the platform looks like the public cloud
for this application.
So we are in the unique situation where we can,
we don't need to be in the cloud or outside of the cloud,
meaning that we can give a strategy with the customers
of what it can do, what is the good point,
what is the most difficult to achieve, on both side,
and also, we provide a way to package application
to deploy everywhere.
We have all these governance tools on top of it
because we know the new way of consuming the cloud
is more open bar, but you need some way of controlling
the situation and we are really trusted advisor
on their strategy, to define what would be their IT
in two, three or four years.
>> Okay, so it sounds like not just the infrastructure
owner but talking to the application owner,
some of the C suite that might make some of those broader
strategic decisions.
>> Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The platform works, meaning that there is no more cushion
on that scale, you get all the benefits that you can see
on the public cloud, now it's more the way you consume it,
you organize the conception
and also you have same environment,
whatever is the application to find,
to have the best place for this application.
>> What would you say?
You're here, as you said in Copenhagen,
thousands of European customers all here under one roof,
what are you getting out of this?
What kind of conversations are you hearing?
What's most surprising to you?
I know we're only in the beginning of day one.
But what are you hearing right now?
>> Well, we talked to a few customers already
and what's a very common pattern, most of the customers
I talked so far, they're really accelerating
on becoming a service organization, so enterprise companies,
they really want to organize themselves to be cloud ops,
and even though we were talking about automation before,
now they really are doing it and they are actually focusing
on changing the skills of their teams, their organizations
and of course the technology afterwards.
>> Yeah, any particulars on automation?
'Cause I think back, we've been talking about automation
my entire career, yet I agree with you,
today it is a more substantial conversation on automation.
Are there any particulars either in Nutanix portfolio
or some of the kind of partner tooling out there
that are kicking things along?
>> So, we talk about automation since a long time
but most of the time that was you have an orchestral
(mumbles), it's like a Swiss knife
and you can orchestrate what you want.
But at the end of the day, nothing was done.
We believe that the platform must be automated by design
and everything need to be by design,
so it's the difference between the produced way of thinking
automtion and now where the platform
is totally (mumbles) by itself.
>> (Mumbles) Prajeev said autonomous--
>> Exactly, I was thinking about that.
>> is the word that we were looking for, yes.
>> This is right to the point.
>> If it's not autonomous, why bother, right?
>> We had example of customers who launch private cloud
projects and they had like 8,000 Mondays to build
the orchestration of the private cloud and honestly,
you should all have a hundred thousand VM's to run,
it makes no sense.
So, the fact that now it's built in and it's not a project
to have automation, that makes sense economically as well.
>> Great.
Well Sammy and Siou,
thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
It's a pleasure having you.
>> Pleasure, Rebecca.
>> Thanks a lot. >> Thank you.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage
of .NEXT
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