Okay, we can just get started. It's my pleasure to welcome Rajiv, President and CEO of Nutanix, and Rukmini, CFO of Nutanix. My name is George Wang. I'm the IT hardware analyst at Barclays. Maybe just to start off, kind of give an overview, Rajiv, can you kind of talk about top takeaways from the fiscal 1Q earnings and the kind of long-term opportunity set for Nutanix? Yeah, I think, first of all, our earnings beat all our guided metrics, and we were also able to raise our guidance for Q2, and so we had a good quarter. We're feeling good about our future as well, and if you look at our outlook in FY 2025, I mean, the rest of the year, and if you look at FY 2025 overall, I'd say if you look at it, I'll sort of give you three dimensions of it: product, go-to-market, and financial. On the product side, we're continuing to invest in our core portfolio, supporting hybrid cloud, modern applications, AI. I mean, that's our core focus. That's what we're continuing to invest in. And that's what customers want. Customers are wanting to modernize their infrastructure, go to public cloud selectively, figure out how to modernize and run these new applications, including AI. Top of mind for a lot of companies in our space. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, very selectively, we're also starting to cover the ability to work with external storage, which is a new thing for us as a company. I'm sure we'll probably cover more of that here. So that's the second thing that we're hoping to get done, starting in the first half of calendar 2025, with early support for the first set of these storage arrays. On the go-to-market side, we're continuing to grow our top line here, focusing on top line growth by multiple vectors there. One overall is we have added more resources to our go-to-market team over the last year. They're starting to come up to speed, ramp, and of course, we expect to see increased productivity as a result of all of that. Selectively, our strategic OEMs, our relationship with Cisco, Dell, and AWS, which we expanded more recently, continue to invest in that, continue to invest in our channel partners. And then all of this from a financial outlook leads to continued focus on both growing the top line while sustainably, and we say sustainable profitability, continuing to grow, expand our free cash flow. Great. Thanks for the overview. Just from high level, kind of can you talk about kind of where we are in the macro and the demand cycle? I mean, obviously, you guys talk about some customers may continue to sweat assets, and you have modest elongation of sales cycle. So heading to kind of the rest of FY 2025, maybe you can talk about the guidance as it regards to how macro evolved in your mind. Yeah, Rukmini. Yeah, so I'll start there. George, thank you for having us. First of all, it's great to be here. Thank you for hosting us. So on the demand and macro environment, we've talked about, as you said, this modest elongation of sales cycles for a few quarters now, and we saw that continue in October quarter as well. And when you think about our revenue guidance, we've assumed that it'll stay more or less the same. So we're not assuming a dramatic improvement or a worsening at this point. We think anything that happens will be more gradual if it does. So we assume that continues. And then some other macro things to think about for us specifically. This is not so macro related as it is out to our revenue guidance, but we've also talked about the fact that we have a growing pipeline of opportunities, but that there's a greater mix of larger deals in that pipeline. Now, a lot of it is by design because we have chosen to go up market and go after where more of the market opportunity is. So that's good. What does that introduce, though, is more variability in terms of when those transactions might land and convert into bookings and into the financials. So that's all also baked into our overall revenue guidance. The one last factor I'll say more from a macro basis is there's a new administration taking office here next month, and so TBD on what they will choose to do and at what pace. So that's another reason, as we thought about our full year guide, that introduces some level of uncertainty as we think about that. Thank you, so when I look at a Nutanix story, arguably one of the biggest catalysts is continued VMware displacement opportunity, and arguably it's multi-year, it's material, but could vary quarter to quarter, so maybe, Rajiv, you can give a refreshed outlook on the current status in terms of the opportunity set related to the acquisition disruption. Sure. The first thing I'll say is even before the Broadcom VMware acquisition happened, I mean, we've always been focused on continuing to displace legacy infrastructure with a modern cloud-like hyper-converged infrastructure that works on premises, but also extends to the public cloud. So that fundamentally has not changed. What's changed, of course, is now we have more and more customers being a bit dissatisfied with what they're seeing with respect to VMware's ongoing interactions with them, whether it be price changes, whether it be potentially long-term innovation, and the support that they could get. So we've always characterized this as an increased opportunity for us to gain share in the market, but over a long period of time, because infrastructure tends to be fairly sticky, there's multiple factors that come in the way as customers adopt alternative solutions. We believe we are the best alternative for customers looking to migrate away from VMware. Most applications running on a VMware platform, we can support and run as is with great performance. And in fact, if they're running on a legacy infrastructure, which is a lot of VMware running with three-tier storage, they can typically run it even better in an HCI environment. So we can do that. The migration is relatively easy compared to most other alternatives out there because the applications can be run as is without requiring any modifications. Now, from a time perspective, there's multiple gating items that come into play, which is the timing of the VMware license renewals, the timing of their hardware refresh cycles, and the overall customer sentiment. Now, one sign of what you're seeing in the market as a result of this is if you look at our new logo count, it's been on a steady climb up year-over-year for the last few quarters, and we expect that to continue as well. Yeah, so if you double-click on the VMware displacement, maybe you look at SMB versus larger kind of accounts, and you guys talk about in the pipeline you're seeing a larger mix of larger deals. So can you kind of give more sort of color in terms of by different segments, kind of how you approach on a relative basis? So I'd say, first of all, the larger mix is not just driven by VMware, right? It's driven by the fact that, look, the top 10,000 customers represent maybe about 70% of the available market. And so we recognize that for a long period of time. And over the last several years, we have been tilting our focus to serve those customers, both from a product readiness perspective as well as our go-to-market focus. So that's one of the reasons why we've seen that. Now, if you look at sort of how this plays out across, the new customers that we are winning, by the way, are across both large and small. It's almost proportional in terms of our ability to capture big ones as well as small ones. Those bigger customers, of course, will lead to larger deal sizes. Larger deal sizes inherently tend to take longer, inherently have more unpredictability in terms of timing and what the outcomes are. That's one of the things we've mentioned in our past calls to say, look, that portion of larger deals, deals over $1 million ACV for us, has been going up. Therefore, that adds a little bit more uncertainty in terms of timing and so forth. With respect to the migration itself, I think, again, larger customers have more complex migrations, smaller customers, easier, faster migrations. Gotcha. So if you look at the kind of data center landscape, you have more modern HCI, but the large majority still kind of resides in legacy three-tier infrastructure. So what's your pitch? So what's the value add that Nutanix can bring to the table to further this share gain versus the legacy three-tier infrastructure? Yeah. So if you move from legacy three-tier to HCI, you get a cloud-like architecture with automation that is suitable for you to run not only today's applications, but also all the new applications that are coming on board, whether it's containerized cloud-native applications or AI applications. We can run those better, more efficiently, drive about 40%-50% total cost of ownership reduction, help you run this entire environment at scale with automation, with a lot fewer people than you would typically need otherwise with legacy infrastructure, and provide you a consumer-like experience so that these people who are running the infrastructure are no longer. They don't have to be trained specialists. They can be actually relatively young and career talent and a lot fewer required to run much larger infrastructure. That's a value proposition. Thank you. Maybe we can talk about renewals. Obviously, that's one of the most positive attributes because that's lower cost. And you guys talk about acceleration in the renewal for FY 2025 versus last year. So maybe you can give us some kind of background, kind of update in terms of where we are in the renewal cycle and how does the renewal play into expanding the cash flow and the operating margin? Yeah. So renewals, as we've talked about before, George, and I think it's what you're alluding to, has been a growing base for us over the last few years. And as a reminder to folks, we switched our business model into a subscription term license-based model a few years ago. And so that's what's allowing us for the renewal cohort to grow. Plus, of course, the more land and expand incremental business we sell, that also starts to flow into the renewal cohorts over time. In terms of, let me sort of demarcate between top line impact and bottom line. So on the top line, renewals is great because we know when the licenses are coming due. We know that because we know when the contract is coming up for renewal. And we have a high degree of confidence in our ability to actually close those because our GRR rates, our gross retention rates are strong. And so that provides good visibility and predictability when you think about the top line, both from a billings and a revenue perspective. So that's good. Now, when you think of, I think your point about leverage to the bottom line, the renewals do transact much more efficiently than land and expand, as I think is the case for most companies. So for us, as the mix of renewals continues to increase from a billings and revenue perspective, that drives leverage in the bottom line. Now, specifically on your point about the renewal cohort size, we talk about something called an available to renew or ATR pool. Think of that as just ACV that's coming from the renewals base. We said that the available to renew pool in 2025 is growing relative to 2024. And previously, we had said, George, that the rate of growth is higher in 2025 than 2024. But as we guided to this year, some of this timing can move around. So there were some that closed in 2024 already relative to 2025. So now we expect that the 2025 renewal ACV or ATR pool is going to be growing at a similar rate relative to 2024. So maybe a quick follow-up for you, Rukmini. Just what have you as the biggest headwind for renewal acceleration this year if we were to take a step back? And you talk about timing, maybe some larger deal variability. So maybe you can expand on that. It's really just timing, right? Because, like I said, these are opportunities that we've already closed in the past, and the customer is purely coming up for renewal, so this is not necessarily a new pipeline. The pipeline is deals we've done before, so it comes down to timing, and often, it's also our team has gotten much better at execution in terms of economics and making sure we're getting. We tend to charge inflation-like adjusted price increases at renewal, but also if the duration comes down. So if it was a three-year transaction, it's a lower duration at renewal, then, of course, the longer the duration, the customer gets a better price from an ACV perspective, but the team has gotten a lot more discipline and execution around that. And then there's core terms, which is when we think about a customer that has maybe a larger estate and multiple endpoints in terms of when their licenses are due. We and they often prefer to have it be coterminous so that it's easier. We have fewer renewal events. So those are the sort of two or three factors that drive renewals. But as of now, renewals are doing well. And one of the reasons for outperformance in the October quarter was good renewals execution. Shifting to land and expand, obviously, you guys champion kind of cross-sell, up-sell across different platforms, kind of higher attach. How should we discount this opportunity set kind of within the context of FY 2025? So I can start it, but you're welcome to add to it. So I talked about how renewals is a nice foundational driver of growth in sort of billings and revenue. It is an ARR as well, but it just helps maintain ARR. So it protects the ARR install base when the more renewals you do, the better it is from a protection of ARR. And then what grows the ARR is any kind of incremental economics we get on the renewal, but the bigger chunk of it clearly is the expand piece, which is selling more to our existing customers, and the land, which is landing new logos. So we've talked about how our Rajiv mentioned earlier that our new logo additions have grown in the last few quarters, which, again, we've put a lot of effort into that. So that is starting to pay off, which is good. And you see that reflected in the guidance. And then on the expand piece, we had some challenges in the October quarter, largely due to the U.S. federal business, which we can talk about more if that's helpful. But so that's one of the things. And we are doing more work to make sure that the expand to work on the expand business. For example, we have hired over the last six to nine months more portfolio sellers, meaning these are specialist sellers who are going to help us drive more attach rate of our broader portfolio, which should their focus will be therefore largely on expand. And then where we can get new customers, also they'll be adding to the portfolio there. So we're doing some things there, but more work to be done on expand. Rajiv, do you want to add? No, I think she's covered it. So yeah, that's going to segue into the federal business. Obviously, the 1Q gets tough comp, slightly softer. But heading to 2Q, it's encouraging to talk about normalization in the federal business. Can you give us a kind of quick kind of overview or kind of dynamic how it plays out? And maybe in the fiscal second half, you may have not as great visibility, but that's being factored into the guidance. Yeah, I think, look, our federal business is dependent upon a set of programs that we are designed into and some more discretionary project-based spending. And a lot of these have been subject to these continued resolutions from a budget perspective over the last year. And what we saw this last quarter was that the programs that we were in, the projects that we were in, did not spend much. And that resulted, of course, and this is the biggest quarter for the Fed, typically. It's their year-end. And usually, we have a this is our strongest Fed quarter. And of course, we also had a tough compare from last year because last year, at the same time, we had a great Fed quarter. So this year, the net-net of it was Q1 was down for us in Fed year-over-year. But the good news is that we do expect Q2 to be back at normalized levels. So we know the programs that we're in. We know the projects we're in. We have visibility into the pipeline for this quarter. And we feel good about it coming back to what we call seasonal normality. The Q1 is still the big quarter, but Q2 is back at seasonal normality. Now, when you look at Q3 and Q4 for us, which is really the first half of next calendar year, really, after January, I mean, there, of course, there is uncertainty because you've got the new administration coming on board. And of course, they have DOGE, and there's all kinds of talk about how the government could be slimmed down. There could be cuts there. But along with cuts, there might also come potentially acceleration in tech spending because tech spending is a way for making these departments more efficient too. So it would be speculation on our part. We don't exactly have visibility into what's going to happen after the new administration comes on board. That's one of the cautionary reasons why we did not feel it prudent to increase our revenue guidance for the full year. We were comfortable raising it for Q2. We got good visibility into Q2. But from a Fed spending in Q3 and Q4, it's hard to predict what might happen. Yeah, maybe we can double-click on the partnerships. Earlier, when you guys talked about long-term and the medium-term opportunity set, you talked about the OEM partnerships and some channel support, including the latest Amazon Web Services with Cisco, obviously, and the Dell PowerFlex, so maybe we can start from the expanded AWS partnership. Sure. NC2 also kind of relates to earlier. You have Azure. So can you talk about kind of your sort of value proposition, both on-prem but also extending to the public cloud? Correct, so fundamentally, we've had our public cloud offerings in the market for a few years now with both AWS and Azure, and the value proposition, very simply, it's exactly the same software stack, the same licensing, which is also completely portable, running both on-prem or on the edge and in the public cloud on bare metal on top of AWS or Azure. The value proposition from a customer perspective is that, first, one team can operate this entire infrastructure using one set of tools. Second, workloads or applications can be easily moved, automated moves from on-prem to the public cloud or vice versa, giving you a lot of flexibility in terms of dealing with whether you want to go do geographic expansion or disaster recovery or temporary capacity expansion, so that's been our value proposition. Now, the specific enhancement of the partnership with AWS was tied to accelerating cloud migration into AWS. One of the driving factors for it was the fact that VMware had a cloud offering on AWS, which AWS is no longer allowed to resell post the Broadcom acquisition. And we believe that the focus from a Broadcom perspective is different now than it used to be before on that particular offering. So many of the VMware cloud customers on AWS are looking for an alternative. And we are working and partnering together with AWS to provide this easy migration path. AWS has a migration acceleration program that provides incentives for customers migrating from those VMware infrastructures over to either native AWS or to NC2, which is our offering on their platform. So early days, we just announced it recently. We talked last quarter about large universities that have actually done this migration. One of the nice things about this particular migration is it's actually quite easy to do. Same hardware. It's very easy to migrate those VMware workloads running in the public cloud onto a Nutanix platform in the public cloud as well. Thank you. Just shifting to Cisco, obviously, Rajiv, they are known for a bigger sales force, a bigger channel. But maybe, obviously, the kind of revenue accretion takes time. So maybe for FY 2025, it could be modest, but it could expand over time. So can you kind of double-click on the Cisco partnership? Yeah. So first of all, I think Cisco is a very clean relationship in the sense that they don't have other products that compete with us in this space. And of course, I have a lot of respect for Cisco. I worked there for many years. And their sales force is, of course, excellent. Now, I would say, though, that their share in the server market and in the HCI market, where we play, has been relatively small historically. On the other hand, they're fully aligned with us. They've been a very good contributor to new logos this quarter as well as the last quarter. And so we're very happy with how that partnership is coming along and look forward to continue to grow that with them over time. Yeah, just for Dell, I think that's the most topical and obviously a lot of things to unpack. From my standpoint, I think that's mutually beneficial. And you can potentially open to other storage arrays. So can you talk about kind of also to Rukmini, kind of you talked about integration in the first half of 2025, then revenue in the FY 2026. So maybe you can talk about strategic rationale behind the PowerFlex and Dell partnership. Yeah. So by the way, every partnership here is a win-win, right? It has to be a win for both sides and a win for the customer. So that's how we approach partnerships. With Dell, specifically, there's two elements of the partnership. The first element is Dell reselling our HCI solution, the Nutanix solution. So Dell is today in the market selling an appliance, it's called XC Plus, that runs Nutanix software on top of their PowerEdge servers. So that's part one of the relationship. Obviously, for us, they have this massive sales force. They know they're a big player in the space. They know how to sell this product. So we're happy about that part of it. That's been in the market now since last quarter, just first quarter in the market. The second part of it is an expansion of where we normally play, which is we talked about a lot of the VMware deployments today sitting in supporting three-tier storage, legacy three-tier storage. Now, those customers are starting to look for an alternative to the hypervisor that runs on the servers that are connected to the three-tier storage. Now, historically, our sales motion has been to convert those customers over to a HCI architecture. But now we see an opportunity selectively to go after and be able to replace a VMware hypervisor without requiring any hardware change and supporting those third-party storage arrays. So the second part of our relationship with Dell is exactly around that, which is we are supporting Dell's PowerFlex arrays with our software, with our hypervisor software. Customers can replace that with their VMware install, with the Nutanix install without disrupting the rest of their infrastructure. We expect to have that offering in the market in the first half of calendar 2025. It should start contributing in a modest way to revenue in FY 2026. Again, these things take time. After you get them in the market, they go through an eval cycle, test cycle, and this is mission-critical application. It'll take some time. We expect to see some revenue in FY 2026 as a result of this. Gotcha. So maybe shifting to kind of take a step back kind of broadly, if you look at different channel incentives and promos, obviously, that have been in place for a couple of quarters. So any latest kind of you want to share and what's the latest thinking behind it? Yeah. First of all, I think those incentives are starting to play. You're seeing the growth in new logos. And for new logos, we've had incentives to the customers. We've had incentives to the channel partners and, of course, some incentives to our sellers. And that's starting to play. And then companies like Cisco, some of our strategic partners, are contributing to new logos. So we're certainly starting to see that play. The second, I would say, is we also resegmented our go-to-market approach where there's a tier of our business that is entirely channeled, where we've let the channel have full swing at it. We only support the channel. We don't have our sales reps calling on those customers directly. And that portion is a relatively small portion of our time. But that's been growing very nicely for us since we introduced it last year. So the channel partners are starting to come on board. They're starting to drive some business for us in some portions of the market and assist us better in the bigger customers. So maybe we can talk about repatriation. For Barclays, we have this biannual CIO survey. And you continue to see increased repatriation. So for Nutanix, that should continue to provide tailwind over the medium term because for the enterprises, they look at the workloads. Some of them are not suited for the public cloud. So can you talk about kind of how the help with Nutanix, especially on-prem world? Yeah, I think the driver for this clearly is there's been a significant realization, I think, broadly among CIOs that public cloud has a lot of advantages in terms of being able to get a new application up and running very quickly, take time to market there, and get that done very quickly. But on the other hand, at the same time, when you're running a workload in steady state at scale, it's a very expensive proposition to run in the public cloud. So that's created this realization that you have to be selective about what applications you're going to run in the public cloud and what applications you're going to run on-prem. So large steady state applications, you can run in a more cost-effective way on-prem. Now, I think that has had two effects in the market. One of it is not everything is simply migrating over to the public cloud anymore. This is why we call it hybrid multi-cloud, so a lot of workloads will remain on-prem, and they will continue to invest in on-prem. The second is what you refer to, which is some of these workloads that are in the public cloud might get repatriated. We are seeing that, I would say, in some areas. I mean, I've had one customer in the U.K. who had made a decision to repatriate everything, and then we've seen a public example of like Elon Musk after he bought X or Twitter. They published a story around how they had repatriated, for cost reasons, some of their workloads over and saved like 60% when they did that, so we are starting to see that. I wouldn't say it's a full trend where everything is coming back by any means. But selectively, I think, yes. And it only helps. I think being in a hybrid world, I think, is a long-term secular growth driver for us, whether it's the pace at which companies will invest in on-prem infrastructure or whether the pace at which they will repatriate from the public cloud. Yeah, maybe we can talk about kind of GenAI. From my standpoint, we still think Nutanix is underappreciated in terms of the kind of private AI DC as it relates to GPT-in-a-Box. Obviously, you guys had a kind of couple of iterations. Yes. Maybe you can double-click on this opportunity set kind of near the. Yeah. I think it's a growing and emerging opportunity for us. I mean, if you look at GenAI overall for the last couple of years, there's been a lot of focus on large language models. There's been focus on training of these large language models in massive compute clusters, but that's really being done by a small handful of players. You've got some of the large public cloud providers and some large MSPs coming into play who are doing this. The vast majority of enterprises are not going to go train their own models. They're going to use models that are already pre-trained on generic data sets, and they're going to use them on relatively smaller clusters after they fine-tune them or do a RAG on them with their data for inferencing, which is really where the actual use cases come into play, and they're able to create value. And those use cases are going to be tied to significant TCO or ROI types of calculations, where they are going to improve the productivity of their workforce or the productivity of their customer support or the productivity of their developers or help them automate processes faster. Those are the kind of applications that we are starting to see emerge. AI, like every other application, is also going to be hybrid in the sense that there'll be some portions of it, like large-scale training that happens in the public cloud. But a lot of the inferencing will have to happen wherever the data is, wherever the enterprise data is sitting. And we all know that enterprise data, a lot of it is still sitting on-prem and will not necessarily go to the public cloud. A lot of it is being generated at the edges. And it doesn't make sense, even from a latency perspective, to go take everything and put it in the public cloud. So for that reason, we're going to see a lot of these AI applications in enterprises being deployed at what you call private or in data centers or at the edges. And for that set of applications, we have a turnkey platform, which is our Nutanix Cloud Platform, along with what we call Nutanix Enterprise AI. Together, you put them together, we call that GPT-in-a-Box. And it's a turnkey platform for companies to easily run these AI applications without having to worry about setting up all this underlying infrastructure. A lot of companies don't have talent. They don't have a lot of AI talent. It's pretty scarce. And so the companies can focus on building the applications that make sense and deliver ROI. With Nutanix, you can have a turnkey infrastructure to run it. That's the opportunity. I would say it's very early stages, early days. It's a topic of conversation with every CIO these days. We have a number of early use cases that we've seen, whether it's for customer support, whether it's for document search and analysis, whether it's for interesting use cases like compliance or fraud detection. These are some of the use cases that we see today. You're shifting to financials, Rukmini. So maybe we can talk about the OpEx, kind of operating expenses. And you guys talk about ramping expenses for the fiscal second half. So can you talk about kind of some of the dynamics we should be aware of heading into the back half? Sure. So just some historical context. Fiscal year 2020 to 2023, we kept OpEx dollars on a dollar basis flat. During that period, actually slightly down because we had some work to do internally, plus we were in the middle of a business model transition. Since then, in fiscal year 2024, last year, we did invest in OpEx. And we have planned to continue to do that now, George. And the reason for that is we have a large market opportunity, as Rajiv has talked about. And so we think now is the right time to go make those investments. So what we said for fiscal year 2025 is that those OpEx investments will ramp over the course of the year. And so if you look at the implied operating margin, second half is lower than first half. but that's because our revenue split is more or less 50/50 relative to the halves, with the OpEx is going to continue to ramp through the course of the year. and that's investment in both sales and marketing on the go-to-market side and on R&D. So just to wrap up, we have a couple of minutes left. Rajiv, maybe just cap off kind of from your standpoint, kind of what's the most misunderstood story about Nutanix? Yeah. I think, first of all, I think if you look at it from an investor perspective, I think we have, for the last 15 years, been a challenger in this market. We've been an innovator. We innovated and pioneered HCI. We've been a successful challenger. I think over the next five years, we have the opportunity to become a de facto platform for running applications and managing data in the enterprise across wherever that data or application sits. And I think that position of leadership is something that we worked so hard to earn, the right to play there. And we are playing there in a land of giants with a differentiated offering. Our differentiated offering, I mean, the consumer-grade simplicity that we provide, the customer experience, our NPS of 90 that we provide, the quality of the platform itself and how it can actually scale from small to very large, and the tailwinds that we have in the market, whether it's hybrid cloud now, which is a secular tailwind, whether it's a VMware migration opportunity, whether it is the increasing set of partnerships that we now have that we didn't have many years ago. We didn't have a Cisco or a Dell or an AWS partnership in the past. And now we do. And these can all be levers. At the end of the day, with what we have, and by the way, we were recognized this year in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for distributed hybrid infrastructure, along with some very large public cloud companies as leaders in the space. What that helps us for the next several years is to provide a great foundation for us to drive, from an investment perspective, continued top-line growth while also expanding our bottom line. That's a wrap. Thanks again to Rajiv, President and CEO, and Rukmini, CFO of Nutanix, to speak at our fireside chat. Thank you. Thank you, George. Thank you very much. Thank you.