Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey’s 5 Boldest Remarks At Nutanix .NEXT

‘On a reflective mood, we have complexity. We were doing upgrades on two things AOS and Prism five or six years ago. This is the paradox of growth -- that growth creates complexity. Complexity kills growth,’ says Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey.

Live From Center Stage

More than 6,000 customers, partners and developers flocked to Anaheim, Calif. this week for Nutanix .NEXT where several new solutions and services were released.

Front and center at Nutanix .NEXT was the hyper-converged pioneer’s founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey who spoke about everything from promising to fix some of the complexity of Nutanix to joking about receiving an award from VMware.

Many of Nutanix executives and employees took to the stage at .NEXT to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the company, who now has a market cap of nearly $7 billion due to its early entrance and strong performance in the hyper-converged infrastructure market place. CRN breaks down the five boldest remarks from Nutanix longtime leader Dheeraj Pandey.

5. ‘We Have Complexity’

On a reflective mood, we have complexity. We were doing upgrades on two things AOS and Prism five or six years ago. This is the paradox of growth -- that growth creates complexity. Complexity kills growth. Look at upgrades in general, the growth of upgrades has gone from like being half-an-hour operations to at some of our customers’ in a large cluster, four or five hours. But this is the burden of responsibility. It’s really taking care of all the servers, all the firmware, all the hypervisors – all doing it without downtime. This conference is about really getting that feedback from all of you to say, ‘What does it mean to be awesome on the most complex of things?’ Because our canvas is no more the simple canvas that we had five years ago. Our canvas is much more complicated and bar for Nutanix has to be about bringing the same kind of delight from our existing customers and our new customers, who actually don’t see this complexity in front of them, but to go and make this 10X faster -- like it way it was five years ago -- is what this conference should be about. That’s what I mean by delivering something which is so delightful that all of you will say, ‘This is the Nutanix of Day 1.’ … That’s a promise that we’re making to you, that some of the things that we were really really good at, we’ll go back and make them as delightful and as awesome as they were.

4. ‘[VMware’s] Not Calling Us Anymore’

Look at what happened at VMworld. VMware gave us an award for desktop -- except, it was from 2011. But if they were to call us, I know that they’re not calling us anymore, but if they were to call us to VMworld– I bet we’ve [win] one more of these again [with Nutanix Xi Frame].

3. ‘Let’s Make Ourselves Invisible’

We’ve had more than 10,000 customers in the last ten years. We’ve had customers in 150 countries, employees in more than 45-50 countries. The overall story itself, the mission of the company, has pretty much been the same. It’s about making things invisible. It’s making even ourselves invisible. We set out to make the SAN invisible. We set out to make virtualization invisible. In the last few years, we said, ‘What does it mean to make ourselves invisible?’ That’s the best place to be when you can be vulnerable and say, ‘Look, let’s make ourselves invisible.’ And that’s about the digital transformation of the company to software and subscription and cloud, which we don’t fully understand. I can tell you that there’s depth behind it, there’s implementation, execution, challenges, transformation in being a software company and a subscription company and such. We don’t fully understand everything, but what I can tell you is that, the word ‘invisible’ is so calm and peaceful. When you think about it, what is it to make ourselves invisible? It really makes my dream complete.

2. ‘Leap Into Hybrid’

Xi Leap is our real leap into hybrid. The idea that you can really drag and drop an entire data center experience – compute, storage, networks and security and identity – what does it mean to really be able to drag and drop all of it from your on-premise environment to an off-premise environment with everything done in pure software with automation. I think that is the final [goal] of hybrid and that’s what Xi is actually delivering. We’re delivering a lot of our services through Xi as well. We have a ton of services that you can deliver and you can try to test-drive on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). All of our products actually work in GCP now. You’ll see a lot value of our products coming through Xi now. \

1. ‘Promise Of The Next Ten Years’

The promise of the next ten years is to do data, design and delivery. Just keep doing the same stuff mainly for a new audience though -- and that’s developers and DevOps. Because right now we see this big rift between IT operators and developers. At some point we have to say that, ‘IT ops and IT is building as much and innovating as much to really deliver a lot of data for developers and a lot of design in many ways in how builders and developers within IT are actually looking for.’ And finally, to deliver it in the most friction-free manner, is basically the next 10 years for us. The more things change, the more they remain the same around data, design and delivery.