>> Live, from London, England,
it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018!
Brought to you buy Nutanix.
>> Good morning from London, England.
I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer,
and you're watching theCUBE's two day coverage
of Nutanix .NEXT 2018 here at the ExCel Center.
Welcome to our program.
Joep and I are gonna spend a couple minutes
giving our thoughts on Nutanix,
what's happened in ecosystems,
what we're hearing from the customers.
So Joep, 3,500 people here, I think back two years ago
when they held the first show in Europe in Vienna,
you and I talked there, it was a much smaller show.
Nutanix is growing some strong momentum here.
Generally as you say at these kind of shows,
you usually have the true believers,
but it is nice to see that a company,
Nutanix, now nine years old,
you know their customers seem pretty passionate.
That they love what it does for them, different careers.
One of the executives, it was Sunil up on stage yesterday,
said, "Hey, you might not get fired for buying
"an IBM or VMware, but you get promoted for buying Nutanix."
So what's your impressions, tell me what you're hearing
from your peers and compatriots at the event.
>> So, what I'm seeing around me here
is the buzz is definitely much bigger
than a couple of years ago.
The show's bigger, it seems to attract more customers
from all over, small companies, big companies,
so seeing that buzz, compared to a couple of years ago
kind of proves that Nutanix has a place in the industry
and that their products are gaining traction with customers.
And looking at the keynotes from yesterday and today,
I see a lot of announcements, a see a lot of work
not just in the products customers are using now,
but also kind of in a forward looking,
we wanna go here fashion.
And that's exciting to me, because Nutanix is growing
beyond just a core infrastructure company.
They are building a portfolio, they're building a platform.
And I think, from what I've been hearing from customers,
it does have traction.
Customers like the direction Nutanix is going,
but I can't help but wonder how many customers
are already using these services
or planning to use these in the near future.
>> Yeah, and one of things I look at,
and I think I've seen good progress here,
this isn't just taking the US show
and shipping it over to Europe.
Nutanix has many years of doing road shows,
it's the .NEXT on the road, things like that.
In the keynotes, we're seeing European,
not in just European customers,
but that the demo this morning
was senior SE, Nutanix woman from Spain
and you see culture when I walk around the show floor,
I know a lot of the vendors here
and it is their European presence
and hear good proof points of what they're doing.
I mean, you're from here in Europe.
What do you hear and see?
>> Yes, I agree, this is not just a carbon copy
of the US show, it has its own identity,
it attracts its own customers, its own partners.
Walking around the show floor,
I do see a lot of customers that I recognize.
I do see a lot of partners from the Netherlands
or from Europe that I recognize, that I work with.
So seeing all that attention from the crowd,
that helps, and seeing Nutanix as a company,
not just US based, but focusing on Europe as well.
>> Yeah, wanna get your opinion.
How's Nutanix doing on painting their vision?
I think back to early days, Dheeraj and the team
have a clear direction as to where they want to take things
and I think they do a good job of focusing on the customer
and laying out a vision
without getting too far over their skis.
Today, I'd look at it, most customers today,
they're really using, I'm using HCI
probably for more than just VDI and starting to spread out,
but when you start talking about from the core
to the essentials, to the enterprise,
some of that is mostly customers aren't ready,
but they need to be hearing a lot of these things.
What's your take, what's some of your takeaways so far?
>> So I think you've said it exactly right.
So, even though customers are only using core products,
mainly, it does help that Nutanix
is laying down this vision of next steps for customers
because even though you could say
infrastructure's a commodity and the cloud is overruling
on-prem installations,
it's still customers are struggling
to go from their current, on-prem,
three tier virtualization layer
up to an application focus in the cloud.
And Nutanix telling that story,
Nutanix telling, okay, this should be the next step,
after that, you can do this.
That helps to guide customers to
not only where Nutanix wants the customer to go, obviously,
but also from that customer centric perspective,
helping customers navigating that difficult swamp
of the next step of cloud, of applications,
and moving from an infrastructure focus
to that application focus.
>> Yeah, look, there's a mental map I use
for when I look at this.
I kind of say that the world of the future
is definitely, I prefer the term multi-cloud,
but that definitely includes my own data centers
or service provider data centers
where I manage more of it.
Let's call that the private piece of the hybrid
and public cloud, and then of course,
there's a lot of SAS in there.
And when I put a company in there and say, okay,
did they lean a little bit too far?
Of course, Amazon, very heavily towards the public cloud,
but we saw an announcement, AWS Outpost,
where they're saying, hey, they're going deeper
with VMware and also with their own stack
to be able to go the private.
Take a company like Dell who leans very heavily
towards private, they have VMware and Pivotal
to help get them a little bit more to public.
VMware going deeper into public.
Nutanix definitely leans a little bit towards private,
but they're doing enough in the public cloud,
they're making partnerships.
I actually like the messaging I heard
on Cloud Native this morning, saying that look,
this is just like cloud is mostly an operational model
and sure there's a lot of great innovation
in the public cloud, but Cloud Native doesn't mean
I built it in the cloud, it milked it.
It's microservices and containerization
and all those things, even serverless.
We can debate whether that can only be in the public cloud.
So, the hybrid message,
I'd like to see a little bit more clarity from Nutanix
as to where that has,
and definitely feedback I've gotten from customers,
but for the most part, I think they're doing a solid job.
>> I agree, so, I think it's a matter of perspective, right?
Where are your roots, where do you come from?
So for VMware, for Nutanix, it makes the most sense
to go from on-prem into cloud, into SAS,
whereas Amazon was born in the cloud.
They attract developers, they attract application builders,
website builders, and so they have
the different perspective, right?
So they are now realizing, okay, on-prem has a place too.
And so the difference is it's just a matter of perspective
and what type of customers are you serving?
So VMware and Nutanix are serving the enterprise customer
that has big legacy roots in the data center,
and they're helping those customers
move towards the public cloud.
But the other way around is just as valid,
because there are so many companies
that built an e-com solution on the public cloud
and are moving back to on-prem for cost reasons,
for security reasons, whichever reason is there
for a customer.
But both perspective make total sense to me.
And if you compare Outpost
to the work Nutanix is now doing with Carbon,
technologically it isn't all that different,
but I think it's a matter of perspective
which customers are we helping in which way.
>> Yeah, you've actually, I'll put a fine point on this.
When I looked back to the early days of Nutanix,
what their mission was is they took hyperscale,
what the really big guys were doing,
and they were going to bring that to the enterprise.
They've done a great job of packaging that.
Early days, we talked about the hyperscale companies
really can put in a lot of high value resources
to build what they need.
The enterprise doesn't have a big team of Ph.D.'s
to throw at things,
they don't have the amount of resources,
so they will spend money to buy what they have.
So that's what Nutanix has done,
they've got great things to show for it,
public company, over seven billion dollars
of market cap, so they can grow that.
They've met the customs where they are
and definitely are a trusted partner
to help bring them towards what Nutanix calls
the enterprise cloud, what most of us call
that multi-cloud or hybrid cloud world.
Alright, Joep, thank you so much for helping us
dig in with some of the analysis.
Be sure to stay with us for a full day,
second day, of coverage.
As always, turn to theCUBE.net for all the interviews.
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.
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