 in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. Silicon Angle is a Silicon Angle media, has a flagship program called theCUBE. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, Tony Parkinson is here, he's the vice president of alliances at Dell. Tony, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. It's great to be here, thank you. So, a lot of buzz between Dell and Nutanix this week. Absolutely, absolutely, very exciting to see, we just announced that we're going to renew our partnership, Alan Neckinson, our GM, announced that this morning here, so that's really exciting. We were at Dell World, I think, one year, we ran it to Alan, he said, I'm going to go do a deal with Nutanix, we said, wow, that's cool, and then last year at .next, we saw him, he was there, he had a presence, but it was still getting started, and then today, he announced the 10-figure pipeline, wow, what a difference a year makes, so it's happening. Oh, I think if you look back, the formal partnership started two years ago, but actually Alan was talking to the Nutanix team even before then, and we're seeing these trends in this journey our customers have been going through, conversion infrastructure, and now this hyper-conversion infrastructure, I think the difference there is with the conversion infrastructure, it was kind of more a bladed architecture, but still how customers deployed service storage and networking was still the same sort of flavor. With hyper-converged, it's really changing the game, and we saw that Nutanix had a web-scale architecture that really facilitated true next-generation technologies based on industry standard platforms. We've got a world-class leading platform with our PowerEdge platform, so it was a great marriage between two companies wanting to be disruptive, and that's what Dell's all about, and you hear from Nutanix, they want to be disruptive as well. So we heard today as well that the agreement was extended. Yeah. Was it kind of timing-wise? It was sort of up for extension? Or was it like you signed an athlete up before his contract is up? No, so the contract we started was in July 2014. So it's about time. Yeah, it's about time for that, and there's no hesitation in renewing it. It's been a hugely successful business for both companies. So a lot of people are saying, wow, once the Dell EMC merge is going to happen, that whole Nutanix deal is going to unravel, I think the point of announcing up- I think we kind of squashed that one. Right, so what's the- Give us the party line on that. Yeah, no, look, I think if you know Dell, it's all about offering our customers choice, and Nutanix gives us a true multi-hypervisor agnostic hyperconverged platform. Great opportunity for us to have that conversation with our customers. Certainly when the EMC acquisition is confirmed, then Dell will be the clear global leader in all things storage, be it traditional storage, next generation storage, sand based on our compelling technologies, for example, and then we have the great assets from EMC combined with the leading hyperconverged technologies and Nutanix, we're in a great position to offer choice to our customers, that's what it's all about. And one of everything. Well, unless it's much one of everything, I think, as we heard this morning, you've got to be able to go with what our customers are wanting. They want flexibility, they want choice, and they want next generation architectures that meet their business needs. And we think we offer that capability to not only integrate with existing architectures, I think that's really important. Customers don't just throw everything out and put the new stuff in. It's a journey for our customers. But I mean, it's not a pejorative. There isn't, if you look at Dell technologies, what will become Dell technologies, there's not a market that it doesn't either, well, basically lead in. Basically, it's going to be number one in every single market segment there is. Block, file, object, big, small. And partnering is in ADN as well, and I think you saw that the level that partnering is evidenced today. And if you look at the history of Nutanix, I was fortunate enough to be in Europe when we signed the original agreement. And they focused on a workload that had overpromised and underdelivered for many years being VDI, virtual desktop infrastructure. They took that as an opportunity to transform how that's deployed, take the cost dynamics out of that, build a huge beachhead with VDI, and now are spreading to more traditional applications, be it even Oracle, DB2, even non-virtualized type environments. So it's part of that success. And we've got almost a thousand Nutanix customers together. And it really is a partnership. I think it's not just a simple matter of taking web scale software and putting it on the best server platform on the planet. It's the engineering underneath that that our customers don't necessarily see, and we don't want them to see, that should be transparent for our customers. So it's building that beachhead with VDI globally, and now you're making it a more ubiquitous platform with cloud. There was an awesome demonstration yesterday of how to deploy a container that really blew away a lot of people in the audience. And that's a new technology for a lot of our customers, but it's that vision, it's that future that the Nutanix and Dell platforms office our customers. So Tony, how does Dell differentiate with the OEM solution versus the other options that Nutanix has? First tier one OEM platform partner, say credit to the work that Nutanix did with the other platform vendor initially. I think that the big differentiator there is customer preference. They wanted a tier one platform and we offer global servicing, a consistent delivery model, especially for global companies who want to deploy these architectures globally across 50, 80 countries. They want to know that the experience from a service support spares infrastructure is there the same in New York as it is in any other country in the world. And I think that's a big differentiator. Also, I think the engineering work that we do leveraging our iDRAC technology, for example, and our PowerEdge platforms does differentiate us. And it's really the holistic experience for our customers beyond just the platform that I think does differentiate us from the other experience. You talked about the growth of the pipeline that you've got and you've got a broad portfolio. How much of it is customers coming and say, hey, I heard about Hyperconverge, or I want Nutanix, I want it for Dell, and how much of it is your channel partners and Dell people being prescriptive on which piece of the portfolio fits in? Yeah, and that's a great question. And I think the approach that we've had is working very closely with the Nutanix team. But when we have discussions with customers, it's a storage discussion. What are your key pain points around your storage challenges that you have? And from then, you then determine, what's your risk aversion to new technologies, for example? Are you a traditional legacy, sand-based customer? You're happy to continue to invest in that technology? And that would be kind of classified as you do it yourself as the best-in-class guys who will take the best-in-class server, storage and networking and put that together themselves. We've seen this converged infrastructure. We still do a lot of converged infrastructure with our bladed architecture, but now the growth and the customer base on hyper-converged is really now, customers are coming to us saying, hey, tell us more about this Nutanix platform architecture. What are your thoughts? Can you do compares? And I think we're in a great position to do those compares, because we will have legacy sand architectures, next generation sand architectures and hyper-converged architectures to compare and contrast cost efficiencies, how quickly can I deploy it? And one of the things we've done a lot of training for our sales makers, what's the value prop, what's the time to value for our customers on these new generation solutions? Explain that nuance. When you talk to customers between, you mentioned you've all has converged, certainly EMC has converged infrastructure and then hyper-converged. What's that conversation like? What do customers say? What's the difference? What do you tell them? Yeah, no, it comes down to, it's more challenging sometimes for larger customers because they have the three silos within the IT organization, their server team, the networking team and the storage teams and converge started to disrupt that, that those hierarchies, hyper-converged disrupts it even more because you don't really need a storage expert anymore to deploy hyper-converged. We typically ask the customers, how much are you spending, keeping the lights running and how much would you like to spend on innovation? And then it kind of filters out, depending on the customers' existing way they run their IT. If they want to continue to pursue that, like I said, there's still a lot of customers out there who say, interesting, but I'll keep my existing architecture, refresh that with the next generation technologies. And then we see, as you saw this morning, I'm say very large organization saying, no, I want to get in and accelerate my journey to the cloud. I believe that the hyper-converged infrastructure gets me there faster than my legacy environment. And what we're seeing is the very large customers having a legacy team, as well as what we call a next generation, platform three organization. It's not black and white. I'm say some of it gets down to hardcore, what's the return on investment given their existing environment? And as you heard today, it's all about the people change. It's the people change management is typically the largest. It's like, well, I've done this this way for the last 15 years, what do you mean I don't need to set up LUNs anymore? That's what I've done. I'm an expert at that. I'm an expert at that. And there's a big transformation. I think, if you look at the data center itself, there's the physical data center transformation that will continue on forever, right? But it's the people and process transformation that I think these new technologies really challenge. If we go into the environment that you're selling Nutanix into, you said you started VDI. Dell's got pretty much with Nutanix. It's the whole stack. I mean, including the client, everything like that. You've got the... That's a true end-to-end perspective. And I think that also played to our strength in terms that we can have that, if you do a VDI deployment, it has to impact these things as well. I think with the wise acquisition we had, is we're one of the only companies now that truly can look at a VDI deployment from, how does it impact the end users from the type of device, right through that middle layer infrastructure management and the backend data center. And the teams work collaboratively across that platform versus having a client discussion independent of the data center discussion and all of those nuances that even coming down to SLAs and one-stop shopping for stuff like warranty support. And that's also differentiation, is that when we look at our VDI deployment, we can offer a customer a one-stop shop for all of their support infrastructure, be it client, be it the operating system, be it the backend infrastructure. So that's been an accelerator for us in our success with this VDI platform in Nutanix. So can you give any color? Is that the majority of deployments that you've had? I would say up until last year, it was probably the majority of deployments, but we're now seeing a rapid shift. So I also have the pleasure of managing the Microsoft relationship as well as the SAP relationship and then now building architectures for SAP based on Nutanix. So it is probably still, VDI is still important, but as we, I don't think we've saturated that market, but as that matures, then you're going to see deployments on technologies from Oracle, SQL, even DB2, right? So customers can manage their virtualized and their bare metal deployments and environments from the one management pane of glass. That's attractive for customers. And so what can you speak to about kind of the GEOs and verticals and where you're finding that? Yeah, so the GEOs, I can certainly cover Europe and North America having worked in Europe and worked in North America. In the GEOs, I would say in Europe, the first country, if you were at the country level, out of the gate was France. France was a really aggressive-elated doctor of Nutanix architectures and then that then spread through the rest of Europe. Then Middle East started to deploy it. So you see this filtering out because in a lot of cases, nobody wants to be first, right? It's a, you know, who heard of Nutanix three or four years ago, right? We haven't seen this level of disruption and success, and we're talking large organizations who are normally risk-averse. You're talking insurance agencies. We're now seeing NASDAQ deploying it. You talk about risk-averse. These guys are normally, whoa, I'll go and play with that in the background. In North America, we're now seeing very large federal agencies, which we can't name. Still some VDI deployments, but medical. We're seeing a lot of deployments in the medical environment, healthcare is a key vertical for these technologies as well as manufacturing. It's really becoming ubiquitous. It's not trying to be all things to all people, but you're starting to see these vertical categories becoming, you know, but the founding stone was VDI and then that's been successful in those organizations and then what happens is by Osmosis, the other IT departments talked to the VDI deployments, was that successful? Well, what if we can use this for other parts of our infrastructure? So you see it really spreading from a VDI beachhead out into other application environments. As those workloads evolve, how does that affect the channel partners? Well, the channel is fundamental to our success and we've been very successful with taking on new channels and new business models for our channel partners. All right, trying to just shift in is a tough business model. There's a lot of value add around the Nutanix platform, new service models being developed and new application tools. You know, if you talk about the cloud, it's an ecosystem and there's a lot of new ecosystems building around the deployment. Things like, how do I run my IT as a service? What are the tools that I need if I move to a hybrid cloud environment? Hybrid cloud architecture, for example. Because I've still got my on-premise assets to manage, but if you imagine the challenge when you move to three or four cloud providers depending on the application you need, how do I manage my SLAs in an on-prem and a hybrid environment? How do I manage my billing? Because more and more companies are billing downstream the lines of business for IT consumption. So they're moving to a consumption-based model. You've got to have the tools to say to the sales department, well, you consumed this much memory CPU and you're costing me and here's the bill and I want to do that on a real-time dynamic basis. So when we scale up the business or scale down the business, so those tools are still maturing, that's a journey. I'm saying we heard from the Nutanix architecture yesterday that cloud burst for my Thanksgiving peak workload. I don't want to have all of that infrastructure burning lights for eight months of the year when I do 60% of my demand in two months. So that's this consumption-based model. IT is a service transformation that we're seeing in our customers. So Tony, Microsoft is another partner in Nutanix talking about the announced the CPS solution. Of course, Dell is, correct me if I'm wrong, the largest CPS partner in Microsoft. Is there any chance for overlap in that? Well, I think there's always chance for overlap and once again it comes down to customer choice and say, you know, CPS, if you're an existing Nutanix customer and you want to deploy CPS, then that's a fairly logical choice, right? Well, overlap is better than gaps. Haven't you ever heard that? Absolutely, absolutely. So I wouldn't, you know. I think they're buying the guy that said that all the time. So no, it's a matter of, you know, we're working with Nutanix on that architecture. We have our own CPS architecture, both the large-scale CPS premium platform as well as the CPS standard. And we've architected that jointly with Microsoft. So yeah, for an existing Nutanix customer, having the ability to run it on their existing architecture is pretty attractive, right? So we're going to continue to work through that. And once again, it's all choice. It's customer choice where, you know, we're not going to force something on a customer if they believe that the Nutanix solution and architecture gives them better flexibility, fits into their existing environment. Then I think that's a perfect solution for our customer base. Excellent. Well, Tony, we're out of time, what's your bumper sticker on Dot Next? You know, what's your trip report? 30 seconds or less. I think it's a force in the industry. The largest customers in the world are applying it. You know, Dell and Nutanix have just renewed their partnership, it's been a terrific partnership. We look forward to continuing to success together. And with the new company, Dell Technologies, you know, we will be the leader in offering our customer choice for their platforms around storage and compute. Well, Dell has a lot of experience in these types of relationships. The Dell EMC deal was epic. It was a very, very successful relationship for the better part of a decade. And look how it ended up. Yeah. Tony Parkes, thanks very much. Thanks guys, I appreciate it, thank you. All right, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.