 Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. Easy. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Phil Davis, he is the president of Hybrid IT, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Phil. Great to be here. And we have Chris Cadaris, he is the SVP America's Nutanix. Thank you so much, Chris. Great, thanks for having me. So two weeks, this partnership between Nutanix and HP, two weeks old, newly announced. Chris, I want to ask you, explain to our viewers a little bit about it and how it came about. What is the partnership? Sure, I think the way the partnership came about was really around customer and partner demand, right? The marketplace was really looking for two great companies that get together and provide a solution for what they wanted to kind of cure their problems. The two components of the partnership, effectively, is one component is the Nutanix sales teams are going to be selling their Nutanix solutions and appliances with a great HP compute infrastructure involved in that appliance. So that's the first big part. And I'll let Phil talk about the second part of the relationship. Yeah, and the second part is really around how do we enable a consumption model for our customers. I mean, if you think about what's going on with the public cloud, customers want to be able to scale up or scale down and kind of pay as they go. So HPE has been leading with an offering we call GreenLake. It's a couple billion dollar business growing over 50% a year, so it kind of shows you the interest in it. And we also, therefore, offer the Nutanix solution on our infrastructure and then wrap that with a consumption model service that allows customers that flexibility. So those are the two elements of the partnership. So you're selling Nutanix with your GreenLake? Embedded in the GreenLake offering, that's correct. And Nutanix has selling compute with their Salesforce. Yes, with our DX solution, with HP compute. Got it. Now, you guys have indirect and direct sales, both sides. Channel play, is it a channel partnership or both? Can you just explain the go to market? Yeah, and I think what you'll see is there's just a lot of alignment, a lot of synergy. Both companies are very, very channel friendly. I mean, HPE is a 75 plus year old company and our very first sale as a company went through the channel, right? So our whole DNA is wired towards the channel. Over 70% of our business goes through the channel. So what we've really made sure is that we make this very, very easy for the channel to consume and also be paid and compensated on. So it flows through all the standard HPE channel compensation and programs that we have in place. So absolutely very friendly for the channel. Yeah, I think this will work really well for both channel communities that we have. We have a lot of Nutanix channel partners that have not been, for whatever reason, have not been selling HPE. Now they have a perfect opportunity to sell HPE compute platforms with our DX appliance. We also have a lot of great channel partners who want a better consumption model where customers are looking to flex up and down. We have not been able to provide that for Nutanix software solutions. So to adopt GreenLake for some of these partners will be a fantastic offering for their customers. Maybe just a dovetail on that comment. One of the things we've worked really hard in the last year is to make GreenLake more channel friendly. Channel reps tend to get paid as the margin comes in. So if you spread that out over time they don't make the same money. So we've changed the rebate 17% up front for the channel partners. We've simplified the offering, we've made it quicker. So we're doing a lot to make GreenLake much easier for our channel partners and a lot of excitement about being able to offer Nutanix with GreenLake as well. What's the timing on the channel rollout? Is it rolling out now? Is it instantly rolling out? Is there timing on? Instantly, instantly. So we've already briefed the channel. We are making it available. We're providing all the quotes. We have a ton of material available online through our online portals and tools for the channel partners. We have FAQs, we have marketing materials. We have actually letters already built up for the channel. So it's now. So I got to ask the hard question here because I think one of the things I see that's really awesomeness is that the channel's going to love this because Nutanix has a challenge and an opportunity. Their challenge and an opportunity is when they do a POC they usually win the business. That's kind of a direct sales model that's favorite Nutanix for their success. This is going to bring a lot of mojo to the channel, bringing an HP and Nutanix together for this unique solution. I'm sure the reaction's been positive. Are they seeing an up step in more POCs and more action with customers? Do you want to take that? Yeah, we're seeing a lot actually. So I was just actually reviewing my team yesterday. We have a list of now starting to get towards a hundred customers that we think we're going to align with together, right? And multiple go to markets. We have Greenlink opportunities. We have DX opportunities, which is Nutanix on HP. We also have a lot of opportunities around Nutanix software only on HP Compute that a lot of customers want to consume as well in a different way. So we're seeing that really start to scale. We haven't done the first POC of DX because it hasn't released to the market yet, right? We are doing POCs on software only on HP servers, but the DX solution will be releasing in the next few months. So Phil, I know the HP channel pretty well and they love services. Wrapping services around an offering. Can you talk about how this impacts on the services side because I got to be, you know, looking at my chops if I'm a dealer partner because I can bring this new solution in and I can wrap cloud-like capabilities around it. Yeah, and you look at a lot of our partners, you know, the hardware-only business is getting pressure. And so a lot of our partners are doing exactly what you just described. They're trying to move more and more into services. And you're right, there's a whole suite of services the partners can wrap around this. Everything from advisory up front because all of these workloads are running on some sort of legacy environment. So when they do bring in a hyper-converge, they need to move the workloads. So partners can help with that. Support and maintenance, implementation, you know, all the way through to kind of day-to-day break fix. So there's a range of services. Obviously HPE has a pretty big services capability. We make those available through our channel partner as well. So if they want to sell the HPE services, they can do that. Or if they want to deliver them themselves, they can do that as well. I want to ask you about the customers. I mean, you made this point on the main stage that you sort of likened back to the Henry Ford quote where you can have as any color as long as it's black and the current marketplace was anything you want as long as it's in my stack and this is how we're going to do it. So giving them more choice, more flexibility, what are you hearing so, sort of what was the problem in terms of their workload and why things were stifled or stunted? And now what do you hope this is going to do? Well, you know, as I mentioned on main stage, everybody wants to make it easy to get onto their stack and really, really hard to move off of their stack, right? Whether you're a public cloud company, you want all your microservices, you want all the data trapped there so it's not easy to move it on. Some of our joint competitors are actually trying to lock you into the complete top-down stack. So the feedback so far from customers and partners has been very, very, very positive because one of the things, I've been in the industry 29 years. One of the things I can tell you is no one company is going to out-innovate the entire industry. And so what customers want is to be able to pick and choose the solutions that best meet their needs. And that's really what this partnership, I think, really embodies is the ability to give customers choice at multiple levels within that stack. Choice in the public cloud, choice on-prem, choice of hypervisors, and that's really resonating. Yeah, and that's really, Nutanix is a design point, right, is around choice, right? Choice at every level of the stack that you can have. And this provides us with the biggest choice in the marketplace at this point in time that was missing from our portfolio. The other piece that you mentioned that I like to point out is the thing that a lot of people haven't been talking about is the services component. You know, Nutanix is a great company. We've grown a lot, but one place that we haven't grown to an extent is in the services side. We have a small services organization that really helps our customers, but we really need a services organization that can help our customers transform and help our customers through a transformation of the underlying infrastructure and reduce the risk of change. And this HPE relationship will help us do that as well. And the other thing too, that's interesting with cloud and you guys are in the middle of it, the modernizing the data center, HPE's been there forever in the data center, is the private cloud has shown that the data center is still relevant. However, if you start going cloud-based stuff, integration's huge. So integrating, not just packaging or solutions, like customers need to integrate all this stuff. This has been a key part of Nutanix and HPE. How do you guys see this going forward from an integration standpoint because on the product side, it's got to integrate. And then in the customer environment, you mentioned the consumption piece. Can you guys just expand on what that means? Sure. Yeah, if we saw Dheeraj's presentation this morning in Sunil's, our entire kind of design point is how do we make everything invisible? How do we make those integration points invisible? Now, we all know that there's a traditional architecture you need to migrate from to take advantage of some of these things. And that's where the risk is, like how do you get from A to B into these environments? As I mentioned, we do have a services organization that helps there, but we could use, now we have one of the largest partners in the industry that could help us do that. I think that's a key component. We will always try to innovate being Nutanix. We will always try to innovate in software. Let's try to figure out how we can make this so much easier, move it up the stack to make sure this is the easiest thing to migrate and have choice for customers. Yeah, and I think maybe just to add to that, if you think about it from a customer view in, a lot of customers moved a lot of things very quickly to the public cloud and the public cloud will continue to grow fast, but they're also learning some things. It's not quite as cheap as they thought it was going to be, like twice as expensive. Moving data around is very expensive. You know, the public cloud is charging you to get your own data back out. Data sovereignty matters a lot more than it used to with things like GDPR in Europe. More and more of the data is getting created at the edge. It's not in the cloud or the data center. And so what we're seeing is customers are now thinking about things, as you mentioned, kind of hybrid and they're talking about the right mix. What's the right mix of public? What's the right mix of private? Where should the data live? And that's a tough story and that's a tough journey for them to go on. So they want to help up front with the advisory services. They want to help in being able to architect that, implement it and then in many cases even kind of run that. And with nearly 25,000 services professionals around the globe, we have a kind of a unique footprint to help customers along that journey. It's an interesting deal. It's very, I think, going to be pretty big. So congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It was great having you both on the queue. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more from Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California. So stay with us.