 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of a new era in database management brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're covering Nutanix's new era database launch. Of course, we had to just start a conversation with Monica and Bala talking about Era 2.0 and to dig into it a little bit further, we have some Nutanix guests as well as one of their close partners. So going across the panel, first of all, happy to welcome to the program, Thanu Kiddapa, she is the DSI strategy and go-to-market with Nutanix. Sitting in the middle chair, we have Anand Akila, whose product marketing leader with Nutanix, and then from HCL, happy to welcome to the program, Tej Singh, who is the Senior Vice President with HCL Technologies, as I mentioned. All three of you, thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad to be here. Thanu, why don't we start with you? You handle the relationship between Nutanix and HCL, as I said, some exciting announcements, database services, help us understand how a partner like HCL takes the technology and what will help bring it to market. Let me start by thanking you Stu for this opportunity. HCL is a very significant partner for Nutanix and we've had this partnership for a long time now. It's one of our longest-hending partnership. Over the five years, we've closed over 100 accounts across all three theaters, trained professionals, both on the Nutanix side and the HCL side, and built the 360 relationship so we can deliver the best experience around solutions to our partners. In the very recent announcement, we are looking to build a database as a service offering with HCL. We want to leverage our intelligent technology that allows us to simplify and increase operating efficiency and couple it with HCL's ability to offer world-class services and its scale to reach the go-to-market needs needed. We're very confident that this solution is going to drive significant incremental business for both our companies. Excellent. Tage, we'd love to hear from your standpoint, what is it that excites you? We know HCL knows the data space real well, so I think you've got some customers that are looking to take advantage of some of these new offerings. So if you look at where the focus has been so far, most of the focus is on taking applications to cloud and moving them from VM to probably containers. One of the most, I won't say neglected, but the space that needs to change now is the entire database space. And if you look at how customers are managing databases today, they have taken hardware on a Kpex model, they have the operating system and the database licenses on an ELM model from the OEMs, and then they have teams which are siloed depending upon the database technology that is there in the environment and managing that. I think that whole model has to change, enabling customers to transform and accelerate their digital transformation journey. And that is where our offering of database as a service is very unique because it offers a full stack of services which includes right from hardware and all the way to operations on a completely utility model powered by the Nutanix era. Yeah, Anand, it might make sense if you can give us a little bit of a broader context for your users, some of the data that you have around this offering. Yeah, you know, at the end of it, all the solutions in our joint solutions, our customers, they are trying to deliver the best end user experience, right? That's at the heart of it, what they're trying to do. I'll give you a couple of customer examples. For example, RBL Bank in India, you know, they deployed their database solutions and applications in Nutanix, got 610 faster application response. That means it used to take like 180 seconds to log in into their application and now it's 30 seconds, a 36th faster. Another example I could give, I can give many examples, but this one is really interesting, Delaware Valley Community Health. At the time of COVID, they went remote, they started working from home and they had medical systems applications, EMR, Electronic Medical Record Applications and used to take, even before they're working from home, it used to take like 171 seconds to log in into medical systems before they could, you know, talk to their patients and look at their, you know, health results and everything. And that from 171 seconds, it went to 19 seconds. So these are some of the values that customers are seeing when it comes to delivering the end user experience to their customers. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen, please Sage, go ahead. Yeah, and I'll just add to what Wayne said that it's also the ability to have cell service with dynamic provisioning capability that really brings the value to the IT teams and to the application teams who are consuming these services. So we have cases where customers were waiting for about a week, 10 days for the environments to be provisioned to them and now it's a matter of seconds or minutes where they can have a full-fledged environments leading to developer productivity. And that also really adds the whole acceleration that Wayne just spoke about. Yeah, we've absolutely seen such a transformation in database for the longest time, it was, you know, a database, it didn't change too much. That's what everything went on. Now there's a lot of flexibility, open sources of big piece of what's going on there. Hey, I'd like to come back to you and you know, Thano, I know you're going to want to chime in here. HCL doesn't just, you know, take this off the shelf and resell it. Help us understand, you know, what is unique about the offering that HCL brings to market with Nutanix? Right, so one is that we have standardized reference architectures which really accelerate the time to consume the offering. We are not building anything from grounds up. The Nutanix is also part of our velocity framework which helps customers deploy software-defined infrastructure as a foundation element for their private cloud. Now, what is unique is also the ability to not only provide operations on different databases that are there in the environment on a completely utility model, but also help customers, you know, move to cloud and adopt the cloud-native databases and then manage the whole show seamlessly using the platform. And that really, you know, if you look at the trend that is there, there's a short-term impact and there's a long-term impact of transformation. In the short-term, there's hardly any industry which is not touched by COVID. And most of our customers are either looking at cost-or-initiatives or are looking at a platform which will help them innovate or find new business model to sail through. In the long-term, we strongly believe that the customers will be in a hybrid, multi-cloud world where they will still have the heritage environments, the oracle and the sequels and a lot of cloud-native databases will also start coming into picture. Now, how do you manage this whole show seamlessly is what going to be the next challenge for most of the customers and that's where we come in along with Nutanix to solve the problem. Well, very simply put, right? We have different categories of customers. One of them prefers to buy the ingredient and make their own meal and some really large customers and global customers prefer to buy the meal and pay for it on an as-consume basis. What HCL does is take ERA which simplifies a lot of the database operations, puts it into a full-stack solution and gives the customer the full-stack solution, everything from assessing their environment to deploying, to making sure that the design is accurate and then of course the day end through, day two through end operation management environment, right? So literally the customer can now offload any of their data center or database management and operation to HCL from an IT perspective and rest assured run their projects through HCL. So HCL becomes their extended arm. The beauty of it is also that working with HCL we're now able to offer the entire solution on a pay as you go model or pay as you use model which is very relevant to the existing crimes where everybody is trying to cut their CAPEX costs and optimize on their utilizations. Well, great to hear about that. You've mentioned that this partnership has been for many years, so I know you've got plenty of joint customers. Anything specifically can share about these new offerings. Anand, I know you've got a lot of the customer stories there. Maybe you can start and would love for you to have the rest of you to talk about it. I'll start with like I talked about a couple of customers but recently I'm really excited about and this is something that we are announcing today as well. A study that we did with Forrester called Forrester TEI study which is what it means total economic impact study. And what they do is that they talk with customers, interview them, four of them and based on their experience, what they observed, what kind of benefit they got, what challenges they had, what costs, they built an economic model. And based on that economic model, they found that customers where all of them were able to get their payback within six months. So Bala talked about it earlier that like all the great experience, all the great value that we offer but at a very, very good cost. So less than six months payback was huge and the ROI for the three years period and again this is a model based on four enterprises was 2,900% so almost like three times more. So whatever they invested, I think on an average day, the cost was 2.3 million and the benefit was 9 million or so. So huge value customers have observed already and with this new launch, I believe that it will just go to the next level. All the things about provisioning, copy data, saving the storage, all of that adds to the ROI that I'm talking about and our joint customers with HCL or otherwise who are customers who are running their applications, their business critical applications on Nutanix platform managed by Era. And Era is built out of a bunch of best practices that over time that we have done. I talked about trust and performance earlier and a lot of the performance comes from fine tuning. You do that like a lot of tuning and to get to a right kind of performance. Era comes with that, those best practices. So when you're provisioning an application, it gives you, you don't have to do all that tuning. So that's the value customers are experiencing and I'm really excited about the joint customers, what they could experience and benefit out of the new expanded solution. Great, Tej or any other customer examples that you'd like to share? Well, we have a lot of, go ahead, Tej. That's okay, go ahead. No, I was just saying that we've had a lot of success with HCL across the board, anywhere from data center modernization to BDI. We had a very large manufacturing company in America's fair, we partnered together. They have a huge number of sub-brands. We partnered together to go evaluate their environment and then also even upgrade that SAP infrastructure. With databases, it's a relatively new offering we're announcing today, but we are leveraging the expertise that HCL has in the market to go and to go dive deeper into that market with HCL. So I will leave it to Tej to give us the HCL examples. So one thing that is happening is the very definition of infrastructure and infrastructure operation itself is changing. So a couple of years ago, for many of our customers, it was about operating system management, hardware management, network management, and over the years, the concept that we are going back to customer is about platform operations. That means everything to do with application operations downward is going to be done by one integrated unit. Now with Nutanix, we can really bring a lot of change and we are bringing a lot of change in the operations model for a lot of our large customers where earlier you had siloed teams around compute, network storage, operating system databases, both at the level two and level three, and you had a level one, which was basically command center. Now we are saying is that with the artificial intelligence and machine learning driven ops, you can practically eliminate the need for command center on the level two layer because the platform enables you to be multi-skilled, you need not have siloed engineers looking after databases separately and an operating system separately, you can have the same set of people who are cross-trained, multi-skilled, looking at the entire state. And at level three, you may want to keep people who are deep into databases as a separate team than from people who are managing the Nutanix platform, which is a combination of compute, storage, and the SDN. So that's the change that we are bringing to a lot of our customers who are going about infrastructure platform modernization as they adopt public cloud or hybrid clouds. Well, I think you really articulated well that modernization journey. We've seen so many companies going through the thing I've been saying with Nutanix for years is modernize the platform, then you can modernize everything that runs on top of it, all the applications. And of course, the database is a major piece of this. Anand, that brings up a point I want to get your take on. We haven't talked yet about developers, the DevOps trend, something we've seen, huge growth for a number of years. So what does this mean from developers? Is this something that mostly the infrastructure team is going to handle or how do you bridge that gap to the people that really are building the apps? Yeah, in this digital world, the cycle time from idea to production, everyone is trying to reduce that. What that means is that things are moving left. People are trying to develop and test early in the life cycle when it is easy to find a problem and easy to and cheaper to fix, right? So for that, you'd need your application environment, your application and database available to test and develop in volume. And that's where Database of the Service era helps developers and DevOps professionals to provision the whole infrastructure for testing and in volume in hundreds and thousands of them at the same time, without worrying about the storage back end, how much storage it is consuming. So it helps developers to really expedite their development and testing life cycle ultimately resulting in excellent individual experience. Yeah, absolutely. We know of just moving faster, being able to respond to the business so critically important. Sainu, Tej, I want to let you have the final word, talk about the partnership and what we should expect in the coming months and quarters. So I'll go first and then we can come in. HCL and Nutanix share the same values where we believe that we need to provide a very innovative platform for our customers to accelerate their digital transformation journey no matter what it is, right? We share common values and we have a 360 degree relationship that started way back in 2015 and we have come a long way since then. HCL also does engineering services for Nutanix and we have close to about 850 or plus people who has trained and certified on Nutanix solutions providing managed services to our customers. Nutanix is also part of our software defined infrastructure portfolio and we are taking it to our customers as part of our entire infrastructure platform modernization that I spoke about earlier. The recent announcement of Nutanix clusters running on AWS, I think is a significant announcement and it will provide a lot of options to our customers and as an SI, we are able to bring a lot of value to our customers who are looking at adopting Cloud. The database as a service offering, I think we are very excited about it. I think we have about 300 plus customers and many of them are still stuck with the way they are managing databases the old way and we can bring in a lot of value to those customers whether it is about reducing costs or increasing agility or helping them modernize the platform and adopt hybrid multi-clubs. Business critical apps are growing, are still growing and data is pretty much gold in these scenarios, right? It's doubling every two years, if not more with every transaction being remote today. With Etceal, we actually look forward to addressing that market and optimizing the environment for our customers. Both of our companies believe in partnership, trust and a customer-first mindset and when you have that belief, trust comes with delivering the best experience to our customers. So we're looking forward to this partnership and we're looking forward to growing our joint revenue and modernizing our customers platforms with this offering. Well, I want to thank all three of you for sharing the exciting news. Absolutely, it looks like a strong partnership, lots of potential there for the future. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thank you. All right, I want to thank the audience for watching this launch with Nutanix, the new era in database management. Personally, a big thank you to the Nutanix community. It's been a pleasure being able to host these interviews with Nutanix for many years. So I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.