>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC,
It's The Cube, covering .NEXT Conference.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back, everybody.
This is day 2 of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference, #NEXTConf.
This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage
and my name is Dave Vellante,
and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman.
As I said, this is day 2 and today,
the keynotes were in the morning.
Yesterday, they were in the afternoon.
So, when we left you yesterday we went right in the keynotes
with CEO Dheeraj Pandey, who gave a very,
as he always does, Stu, a very philosophical
deep discussion, a lot of commentary
from thought leaders and some customers.
Somewhat long, although shorter than last year,
but that's Nutanix likes to do things.
They want you to bake and savor
what's going on in their community and their ecosystem.
Today, it was all about product.
Sunil Potti got up and he basically took us through
the products, the new innovations, the strategies,
and that's what we're going to unpack this morning
in the next couple of minutes
and then go deeper throughout the day.
So, Stu, it's all about cloud.
Two years ago, at the first, the inaugural .NEXT Conference,
Nutanix laid out a strategy
of moving beyond hyper-converged infrastructure.
This is at a time when everybody was pivoting
to hyper-converged from the traditional converged,
or the legacy infrastructure.
And they laid this long term, little bit fuzzy vision
about supporting cloud and multi-cloud.
At the time, it was really focused on migrating
off of VMware onto other platforms,
but they sort of teased us with a vision of cloud.
Today, we saw that vision
come into a little bit more clarity,
but there's still a lot of questions.
Give me your summary on the keynote today
and specifically, this Nutanix strategy
of being the cloud operating system.
>> And Dave, I think vision is the right term
because unlike previous announcements by Nutanix,
a lot of what they laid out here
are things that in development.
The two big announcements that they talked about yesterday
and went through a little bit more today,
Calm, which was an acquisition
that they had made last year
really, to be able to help them
try to be that management across multi-clouds.
That's in process I believe, if I remember right,
it's the second half of this year, it will be shipping.
I got a note from a friend of mine,
and they're like, okay this is the 687th product
in the industry that's trying to solve this problem
because everybody is trying to solve this problem.
Microsoft wants to be the player here.
Companies like CA want to be in the lead here.
Of course, Amazon would like to manage everything
because just put it on Amazon.
So, why is Nutanix position to be the control playing
layer of a multi-cloud world.
Nutanix is a small player.
They've got some good pieces.
They're starting to touch some of the environment,
but I'm not sure.
In the second one, the zee or jee cloud services,
that's not- >> Zee, Si, jee (laughs) ...
>> It's spelled X-I and we've heard multiple pronunciations.
We'll get Sunil on this and get him-
>> X-I is, as you told me this morning,
the last two letters of Nutanix flipped.
>> Yeah, so, it's a DR service that they're going to deploy.
It's in development right now.
I don't think we know anything about pricing yet.
It's not going to ship until the first half of next year,
is the target for that.
But really lays out, as to, I think we really want to get
to the Google relationship and beyond.
How does Nutanix get to be more than just
an on premises infrastructure layer.
They've already sold to service providers.
I've talked to companies that
not only build their infrastructure,
but sell services based on
using Nutanix as an infrastructure,
but they're going to take that full Nutanix stack
and make it available
in Google data centers around the world,
and we expect them to expand those partnerships
and what Sunil was hitting on at the end of his keynote is,
the terminology they used is your cloud native,
your mode one applications,
a lot of times those start in the public cloud,
and sometimes those come back
to an infrastructure like in Nutanix,
where I can run it in a similar operational model.
And then, do we take our mode two applications,
the big legacy, the thousands of applications that we have,
do we try to shove those in to the public cloud?
And the challenge there is
if it's not the same stack on both ends,
it's not the same operating model, there's challenges
and I know we wanted to use that out a little bit.
>> So, Stu, I had a conversation with Paul Moritz in 2009,
where he said to me,
"The advantage that Amazon and Google and Facebook have
is that they have homogeneity in their data centers."
And he said, "For us to succeed in cloud,
we have to have homogeneity in both
on prim and in the cloud."
And so he, at that point, indicated that
the VMware strategy was going to be putting,
essentially, VMware in these clouds
and the cloud service providers, as we all know,
that manifested itself in vCloud Air.
We've heard the story before.
How is this different?
>> First of all, vCloud Air,
most people would agree, a failed strategy.
>> Who would not agree with that? (laughs)
>> Right.
The biggest challenges we saw on vCloud Air
when I talked to the community is
VMware said, "Wait, we're going to build it ourselves
and run it," and customers were like
well, I've got lots of partners,
and they're like, well, we'll partner with Savvis.
And Savvis made no margin on this.
Couldn't do anything else.
They tried to go to lots of other service providers,
and they were, I don't know how I add services,
I don't know how I add value.
>> So, how is this different?
>> You look at this and say okay, well, Nutanix
is going to start with building it themselves
because they want to understand it.
I've talked to service providers here that say,
"Hey Nutanix, we have experience and we know how to do this.
We could advise you on this."
Of course, Nutanix, they didn't come out
and say this is the future,
everybody run every service on this.
They say, hey, we're working on a DR solution,
we're a little bit measured.
This is where we're going.
I think there's time for it to mature,
time for Nutanix to work with their partner Ecosystems.
The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility,
but a lot of it is pressure leased slideware, if you will.
You say, "Okay, great, I'm going to take Z and run it on GCP."
Well, this is a product next year that, maybe,
will probably run somewhere with Google.
Where's the details?
>> Okay, talk about lift and shifts, too.
>> Thanks Dave.
We talked yesterday to one of the doers,
one of the practitioners of Nutanix,
and they said, "Hey, I'm looking at containers."
And we said, "Hey, are you looking at Nutanix for this?"
They say, "Well, now that I hear
they're working with Google,
who's obviously a thought leader in driving that,
that will drive them closer to us."
So, question is, the Z cloud service is based on AHV.
So, if I bought in,
there are some customers who say
"I want a virtualized environment that I can mirror,"
but most of us look at it and say
virtualization is kind of heavy for taking something
to more the public cloud.
If I containerized, then I can use kubernetes,
and I can move applications a little more.
Debate we're having internally, Dave,
often is how much of the stack do I have to have
to complete hardware all the way through on both ends?
Do I have something like kubernetes, which allows me
to take containerized applications and move them,
because lift and shift, I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit,
and it said let me build
my new applications on the platform,
and then I'll start migrating some over
so I have that shared management platform
to hold the environment.
But, it's challenging.
The same thing we've had discussions.
Amazon, there's certain applications we build there,
Amazon would love you to take all of your applications,
but it's not trivial.
Porting something over is not easy,
is one of the points that Nutanix was making,
and we've heard from the community
that Amazon really doesn't want you
just to trying to lift the whole thing and shift it.
You should be doing some refactoring,
or start pulling apart your application-
>> They want you to pull change the operating model.
So, Stu, is this a blind spot for Nutanix?
Let me back up.
We asked Pat Gelsinger,
when Docker and Core OS came on the scene,
what does that mean for you?
He said, "Hey, we've got the best container
in the world. It's VMware."
And we all kind of went, mm, I don't know.
Is this a similar head wind potentially?
Is this a threat that Nutanix
is so VM focused versus containerize?
Or can they just embrace containers?
>> Great question.
Something I want to pose to the Nutanix executives, Dave,
because there's multiple paths forward.
When we asked Amazon a similar question,
they said to get from your legacy data centers
to public cloud,
here are the eight R's, as to refactor, re-platform,
redo this, things like that.
There's more than one solution.
As we know, customers have lots of applications.
There's some that you're going to leave them sitting on.
That old hardware in the back corner and run it
until that thing burns into the ground.
>> Running on CMS.
>> Absolutely, Dave.
Many of those things got moved into VM environments
and are going to stay there for awhile.
So, unfortunately, everything in IT tends to be additive,
and we've got all of the debt of ...
>> Don Tapscott.
God created the world in six days,
but he didn't have an install base.
The technical debt.
>> Technical debt.
>> All right, Stu, we got to wrap.
This is day two of Nutanix.
We're going all day long.
Today, heavy executive, partner and customer day.
We have Sunil coming on.
We're going to go deep on products.
Chad Sakac coming on from Dell-EMC.
We got Dheeraj, of course, the CEO.
Stay tuned, everybody.
Stu Minima, Dave Vellante.
We'll be right back after this short break.