Analysts who predicted edge computing would kill the cloud will be surprised to see cloud computing software company Nutanix Inc. announcing its new Xi IoT intelligent edge computing service. So what makes a company known for hyperconverged infrastructure appliances and software-defined storage embrace edge computing?

Satyam Vaghani (pictured), vice president and general manager of IoT and AI at Nutanix, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure, at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, during the .NEXT Conference in London. They discussed how Nutanix is rising to the challenges of the next-generation, bringing its signature elegance and simplicity to the complexity of the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Welcome Satyam. We had you on the program a little over a year ago to talk about Project Sherlock, when Nutanix was starting with IoT. Fast forward to today, it’s now called Xi IoT. Help bring us up to speed as to what your team has been working on and what’s the state of the product today?

Vaghani: A year and a half ago, analysts were projecting that a lot of enterprise data was going to be produced at the edge, [and] it was important to process at the edge for many different reasons [such as] autonomy, security, cost and compliance. So that was the genesis [of Xi IoT].

We thought we were very well-suited to [edge intelligence] because it was yet another problem where you needed to provide a very elegant system, a very well-contained system — just like hyperconverged infrastructure is for your primary data center — in an extremely remote and extremely hostile environment.

Along the way, our ambitions broadened to being a multicloud company. That fit in, because IoT is never an edge-only problem or a cloud-only problem. Every IoT app kind of spans the edge in the cloud. This was a perfect way to showcase the multicloud data plane, multicloud control plane capability [of Xi IoT].

Piscaer: If I look at this from that technical perspective, I still see a data center; I still see the cloud; I still see data going back and forth. What makes Xi IoT different?

Vaghani: One is the focus on edge computing. We said, let’s go from the edge outwards. Because in an enterprise context, data processing, the amount of data, the volume is pretty overwhelming. So one difference is the richness of services that we provide at the edge.

Another difference is the pipeline all the way to the cloud. We don’t consider this as an edge-only problem, so we not only do a pipeline to the cloud, but we allow the customers to have a choice of cloud. We don’t dictate the choice of cloud just because we are providing a solution to the edge.

Another key difference is the ease of use both for deployment and operations of the edge device itself. So think about deploying [Xi IoT] on a thousand stores. We made it zero-touch provisioning process. So the only requirement to deploy the Xi edge is that you plug in the internet cable. That is very core to the Nutanix philosophy: simplicity, one-click simplicity.

The last thing [that makes Xi IoT different] are APIs. It’s the programmer APIs that whole system exposes, it’s Apache class APIs, open-source class APIs. So that people who are already used to various programming frameworks can immediately jump on this.

Miniman: You bring up something we saw in our research, as one of the biggest hurdles: operational technology doesn’t play with information technology. How do you hope to bridge that gap? 

Vaghani: The only way to make OT appreciate a solution is to show them a path [where they] can adopt Xi IoT without causing disruption to their machine-critical setup, OT setup, that they already have. So we put a lot of thought around how we could source data from OT systems without throwing out, ripping, and replacing every OT data gathering point and device that they have.

The other part is to provide some extra added benefit. So to that end, we think there are some specific security benefits, some resource management benefits, some user management benefits that we can provide in this new edge. So it was about having something for the OT guys to appreciate, so that there is some buy-in as opposed to dictating that “you’ve got to do it.”

Piscaer: One of the things I observe in the industrial world is there’s quite a lot of developers actively developing while gathering data, while figuring out IoT. How do you let those developers work on that platform as well?

Vaghani: Essentially, it’s like a [platform as a service] but for the edge. So there are container services functions, there are some data services, and AI services. But the developer point is very interesting. How can we be a more developer-centric company?

I think it’s an awareness thing. Once people see the platform, the APIs, there is true interest. So now it is up to Nutanix to have enough events and awareness campaigns to make sure that this word spreads out. Unfortunately, I don’t have a silver bullet for this; it’s literally going to be a work in progress.

Miniman: Speaking of areas that don’t have silver bullets, you mentioned security. How does Nutanix look at the security aspect? 

Vaghani: I’ll give you a concrete example that is making a dramatic change. You can always argue that your platform is secure, but how do you prove it?

One proof point we have is that from a security point of view, the Xi IoT edge is locked down. Even an administrator cannot login. The idea was that if you let the administrator have a username and password to an edge device, it is bound to be a point of compromise no matter how secure you are. So the only way to eliminate that is to just eliminate the need to have a username and password to an edge device.

This is actually tightly ingrained in how the [Xi IoT] system is designed because you can’t test the edge. You can deploy all the applications you want, but you can’t touch it. We provide containers as a service to the edge, but you don’t configure containerized solutions on the edge; the system does it for you. The more automation we do, the more we remove humans from some of these very machine, security-critical points, the better off we are in terms of reduced chances of hacks.

Miniman: What are some of the key things down the road that you’re excited for?

Vaghani: We want to make this a platform that is attractive to OT folks and that is attractive to IoT vendors who have been creating very vertical-specific IoT apps. We want to prove to them that this is a way better platform for them to deploy their apps at industry scale. We want to appeal to AI guys, data scientists who are going to create interesting applications around data processing. So some of the next few steps are to provide interesting features and functions in the system which appeal to all these demographics.

From a go-to-market point of view, we want to make sure that we get some partnerships right, because this is not just a technology problem. We are open to a “bring-your-own-cloud” philosophy for our IoT platform. Out of the box, we support Azure, AWS, Google, and private cloud if you bring that in. Maybe we’ll expand that portfolio because there are other cloud providers.

Then last but not the least, you are going to see more and more investment in AI Because, there’s obviously a lot of talk about AI. And it’s kind of easy to do a proof of concept, but it’s very difficult to deploy that proof of concept at an industrial scale. So that is a problem we want to really, really solve very well. So you’ll see a whole bunch of investments, features, announcements around that.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE