from the architecturalist and the nutanixist: Thank You!

Happy Thanksgiving, Folks.

It’s an American Holiday, and like so many holidays, its origin and history are complicated.

And it is a moment to stop and say thank you! And it’s important to say Thank You for the important stuff. My wife and son, first and foremost. My health is fine. My extended family, starting with my sister and her family, and my father. And my cousins, aunts, uncles, and nephews. And the people I play Dungeons and Dragons with. The people who let me mentor them, and the people who mentored me. The amazing community of folks I have interacted with on this platform. Even when we disagree, I learn.

And if that were all I had to be thankful for, I would be blessed beyond measure.

And yet, there is one more thing I want to be thankful for.

When I left Broadcom, I thought that my chance to build a global private cloud had ended.

I landed at Nutanix, and really thought I was joining NetGear. An SMB company that had delusions of enterprise grandeur. But the folks I talked to were really sharp, and they had something special, and I liked the space. I figured I would help them move the ball forward, and then retire. Going from SMB to Global Enterprise Cloud is a 15-year journey, and that was outside of my then-desired planning horizon for working.

And that would have been enough to be thankful for. But I also found a superb culture that was welcoming, open, and focused on what can be done, not what can’t.

But it was even better.

I had joined Arista when market dynamics made their technology, business model, and customer focus far more valuable. For those who have been following my posts, you have been on the same journey of discovery that I have been.

My first week, I walked around wondering, “Why the hell do these people even exist?”

For 9 years, I had made it my mission to have vSphere customers have no reason to look elsewhere other than vSphere.

And yet here they were. At first, I thought it was because Nutanix had just found parts of the market that VMware’s GTM had ignored.

But as time has passed, I realized what was really going on.

Nutanix has been on a 15-year mission to build the private cloud on a solid foundation of computer science fundamentals. A single set of consistent entities on a single global logical database that can scale to absurd numbers and is built on transactional infrastructure.

That took 15 years to build.

And when I dug into it, I realized Nutanix won, not because of GTM, but because they offered a unique product and platform. Precisely the kind of platform I imagined we should build at VMware, but I didn’t understand what that meant and missed critical details.

And so, at a point in my life where I thought that building the global private cloud was part of my past, it suddenly became part of my future.

I had unwittingly joined a company that had completed the 15-year journey.

And so when I was least expecting it, I got a second chance to finish a job I started in 2004.

Thank you, Nutanix

Which leads me to a postscript.

Some of my former colleagues wonder, “Did you just join the competitive marketing team? What have you done there?” and all I can say is, “I can’t wait to show you…”