>> Man With Accent: You got any phone calls
you need to answer?
(laughing)
>> Man: Hold on, let me check.
(lively music)
>> Welcome back and happy to have
a special presentation of The Cube
here from our Palo Alto studios.
Welcome back to the program.
A multi time guest, Howard Ting.
Who's the CMO of Nutanix.
And we're going to be talking about
Nutanix.NEXT 2017 Washington D.C.
at the beautiful Gaylord.
Howard, thanks for joining me.
>> Great to be here again Stu, thanks.
>> Alright so, boy, not a lot gone on
in the last year.
Company went IPO, you've added to your family,
lots of things going on.
So tell us, what's new in your life?
>> Yeah, it's been a pretty memorable 12 months.
Actually, it's been a pretty memorable 4 1/2 years
for me at Nutanix.
I joined the company when it was doing
a couple million and probably had
less than 100 employees and now,
we're approaching 3,000 employees
and we're doing close to a billion
run rate in sales.
You can imagine a lot has happened
and a lot of things to be proud of for sure.
>> Yeah, so we've talked to (mumbles) a couple of times
before the IPO rate, after the IPO.
I want to get your viewpoint.
Is there more magnifying glasses on you?
Do you get more calls or people calling you
everyday about every move and change on Wall Street?
What's it like on the inside?
>> Sure, yeah, it is different, it is different.
But, I think, for most people, it's not that different.
For our sellers, for the people who work
at our headquarters office for people
who are supporting our customers.
The day-to-day is no different.
I think there is this quarterly cadence now,
obviously, as a public company.
>> Interviewer: A 90 day shock clock perhaps?
>> Yeah, there's a shock clock.
But we've been operating like that
for, probably, five to six quarters
before going public where we were on this cadence.
So, I think, there's a little bit more
of that cadence and attention to results
on a quarterly basis and, obviously,
more careful planning and things like that.
I would say, from a sales and marketing standpoint,
I think the brand has gotten a huge lift
from going public and the awareness about Nutanix
and also, the category and the disruption we're creating
is at an all time high.
It's been, definitely, a big help in that regard.
>> And so you won't need to do a funny video on the street
asking people what Nutanix is?
>> I still want to do that.
We have to see.
It'll be fun.
See if I can find some Trump impersonators.
I might have a little bit of a twist.
>> Well alright, you always like
to bring some interesting things.
Let's get to the preview of the show itself.
It's the third year of doing the show.
The first year was in Miami.
Second year was in Las Vegas, 118 degrees.
How you going to keep the heat in the show in D.C.?
>> I think the heat at this conference
is always the attendees and the content.
It always comes down to the people
you're going to spend time with
and the great content you're going to absorb.
This year, I think we have something like 70 plus sessions.
Over 100 speakers.
And as with every Dotnex,
it's always about customers presenting.
Our users presenting what they've learned,
how they're using it, what has gone wrong for them.
Pit falls to avoid, things like that.
So, just awesome content.
That's first and foremost what's always
made it a great event.
And, of course, we like to sprinkle in
all the little extra stuff that you expect.
We have this thing called NX files where,
under India, leave your phones at the door kind of thing.
Where we will show all the advanced R&D that we're doing
for select customers and prospects.
>> Okay, so Howard, you're going to give us
a preview of all that here, right?
>> Can't give you too much of a preview Stu.
But I can tell you that it's something
that you, definitely, want to check out when you're there.
So we do stuff like that.
We have a bunch of other programs around the event.
We have partner track for our resellers
and our channel partners.
We have an alliances track.
We have a customer advisory board.
So there are just a bunch of programs.
It's not one event, it's five or six events
all packaged into a couple of days.
It's a pretty intense couple of days.
>> And we're excited at The Cube.
Thank you for bringing us back there.
One of the things you guys do really well
and we always appreciate at shows
is we get to talk to the practitioners.
We love to talk to the people that are employing it.
I've had the pleasure of talking
to service providers, to enterprise customers,
to smaller customers and I'm, assuming, in D.C.
you're going to have some government customers there.
>> We will have a few, yeah.
I don't know if they're going to be able
to talk on The Cube but we'll certainly try.
The U.S. Federal Government's always been
a fantastic vertical for us.
One of the reasons why I decided
to bring the conference to D.C.
is to show that team some love
because they've been such a big contributor
to our company's success.
And we're doing so many interesting things.
One just quick side note.
We're now partnering with a company called Class,
who have built a hardened
system of platform that runs our software
and this data center is being parachuted into battle fronts.
It's a really interesting use case.
There's so many things like that
that we're doing with the federal agencies
that, hopefully, we'll get some
of those stories out at the conference.
>> Beyond the conference itself,
can you give us an update, kind of partnerships,
shifts in the industry.
There's been a couple of acquisitions
in the storage space and of course,
you guys are not a storage company
but overlap and play against some of those.
What are you seeing these days?
>> Clearly, I think, all the big systems vendors
are now comfortable leaning in on HCI.
I think HCI has become almost like a defacto
starting point for a conversation
about any sort of new infrastructure deployment.
Whether it's a private Cloud initiative,
a data center refresh et cetera.
And so, I think there's far less resistance
to the concept of HCI today.
I would say, also, that the market
is still trying to understand all the differences
between the different HCI options.
Because you have some Gen 1
type products like Cisco HyperFlex.
You have some much more advance products
like VxRail and then you have products
like Nutanix that are much more than HCI,
much more than hyper converged.
We market and message as an Enterprise Could platformer
and price Cloud Operating System.
And we do networking and security,
we do Cloud orchestration, we have built-in virtualization.
So we do so much more than HCI.
So our conference, is not a conference
about hyper converge, our conference is about
how to build Enterprise Clouds.
And I think it's the only conference
we would argue or maybe,
the best conference where you can meet
the practitioners building Enterprise Clouds.
>> It's interesting, we've definitely watched
that messaging resonates with a lot of things
we've been saying and hearing from our community
on the research side.
We called it True Private Cloud
as well as just, what is that hybrid definition?
I've been up in San Francisco attending
the Google Next conference.
There's a Nutanix booth there.
I was at AWS Reinvent, there was a Nutanix booth there.
How do you guys see your relationship
with the public Clouds and private Cloud,
hybrid Cloud, how does that fit into your overall messaging?
>> Yeah great question.
For us, Enterprise Cloud is the Cloud.
And the Cloud has to stretch across boundaries.
In the future, we don't see a real delineation
between public and private.
In the end state, if there's ever such a thing.
Whatever it is, three, five years out,
we think that the workloads in apps
will move very freely between borders.
Between walls of a data center.
It's all going to happen with one click simplicity and delight.
We believe we can deliver.
We think that real hybrid scenarios.
They're not fulfilled today.
There's a lot of promise.
There's a lot of talk.
There's a lot of hype.
But there's no real execution
of true hybrid scenarios.
I can tell you and this is my
one little nugget that I'm going to drop
for you as a preview.
I can tell you that hybrid is an area
that you should expect, for us,
to make some announcements around coming this year.
Because that's an area where, I think,
there's a massive opportunity for a company
like Nutanix to do it well and own a great share
of the real estate.
>> Well Howard, I want to give you
the last word on the conference itself.
I'm sure you've got an audacious goal,
for the team, as to how many people are going to be there.
What's the pitch to get people to say,
go to Nutanix.com/Next, click that button now,
come join us at the end of June?
>> I'd say it's the best place to come
if you're thinking about the future
of your IT operation and I want to make it
as broad a statement as that.
It's not just about what you're doing
with a particular PC or stack,
it's about thinking about your real strategy.
Long term, what is my Cloud strategy?
And if anyone out there is wondering about that,
this is the conference to go to because
we're going to have conversations about hybrid Cloud,
we're going to have conversations about
how many of my workloads should I put in the public Cloud?
We're going to have lots of conversations
with practitioners that are building
the private Clouds today.
There's going to be a lot of rich content.
I think this is the place to go
if you're thinking about Cloud.
And you really don't know where you're going to end up.
Whether you're going to end up, mostly,
end up in the public or private but
we think that's where
most people are today, they're not sure.
There's a lot of boomeranging too.
Folks that have started in the public
and now, they're trying to bring work load back.
If you're in that scenario because
the public is too expensive,
this would be a great place.
Cause we already have a few customers
presenting on why they brought
work loads back and how they were able to do that.
>> Not to just be a blatant plug
but we go to a lot of shows.
I tell you, the community of people
that are at the show are great.
And something that I don't get at every show.
Not only do you get to understand the technology
but you've got some good thought leaders.
And not just technology industry leaders
but thought leaders in general.
Talking about innovation, talking about the future.
I see you've got founders and CEO's
and professors and authors that I've read
and have seen that at previous shows.
So always excited to have places
not only that I can learn
but expand the mind so we're excited.
I mentioned to the audience Nutanix.com/Next
is where you can go register for the event.
Of course, check out, siliconeangle.tv
for our upcoming events including
the Nutanix show and look forward
to seeing you at many of the shows up.
Howard, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Howard: Thank you Stu.
>> And thank you for watching The Cube.
We'll be back with more coverage here
and you're watching The Cube.
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