It has been a decade since Nutanix Inc. was an ambitious storage startup building software for distributed architecture out of a single office in San Jose, California. Those 10 years have seen the company grow from its Silicon Valley roots to a global company with over 5,000 employees in 79 locations across 40 countries.

Yet, as Nutanix Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dheeraj Pandey (pictured) looks back on the start of the company, he sees the same problems the company set out to solve a decade ago reoccurring in the burgeoning complexity of multicloud.

“I’m a big proponent of the saying, ‘The more things change, the more they remain the same,’” said Pandey. “Hybrid cloud is another word for hyperconverged clouds, and whatever hyperconverged infrastructure was in 2010 is what hybrid is today.”

Pandey spoke with Stu Miniman and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the .NEXT Europe event in Denmark. They discussed the past and present vision of Nutanix (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Private cloud equals HCI

It has only been in the past three years that the CEOs of the global 2000 companies have started to understand that there is very little difference between private cloud and HCI, according to Pandey. “So there’s a bell curve of technology adoption,” he said. “We are in the very early stages of what hyperconverged clouds will mean or what hybrid cloud should mean.”

The rise of mobile technology mirrors “exactly what hyperconvergence data is,” Pandey explained. “We had all these gadgets, and they were single-purpose gadgets. [Then] we made them as apps, and they were all together in this one device. And then the device connected to cloud services. That’s what happened in enterprise computing as well: Compute, storage, networking, security, everything coming together as pure software.”

Nutanix’s mission is “to really elevate IT to go figure out things that really matter to the business,” Pandey said. This means “a focus on applications and services as opposed to going and stitching together stuff that really can be done with pure software and a standardization,” he added.

But solving the current complexity of multicloud is no easy task. Pandey sees it as an ongoing task that could take decades. “I think the new day and age of multicloud and what we have to do to virtualize all these different silos that have been merged, and to virtualize, simplify and integrate clouds is going to be a journey of a lifetime,” he said.

Removing the hubris from Silicon Valley

Nutanix’s recent switch to a software subscription model came from paying attention to what its customers actually needed rather than telling them what they wanted. “You want to walk to where the customer is before you walk with them to where you want them to be,” Pandey stated.

“Let’s remove the hubris from innovation in Silicon Valley,” he said. “I think when you try to go and understand and have empathy for the customer is when magical things are happening.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of .NEXT Europe. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Europe event. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE