 From Austin, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Dell World 2015, brought to you by Dell. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell World. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Getting ready on day two for the closing keynote of Dell World, happy to have back on the program for the second year of Bob Wall's VP of OEM sales with Nutanix. Welcome back, Bob. I had to be here, Stu. So Bob, last year, we had you on the program, talk, this is a big deal for Nutanix. I mean, I've tracked Nutanix for a few years, but getting an OEM relationship with Dell made a lot of visibility. I think a lot of people now know Nutanix a lot more. So, bring us up, what's the last year been like for you inside the company, and specifically the relationship with Dell? Yeah, so I'm responsible for a relationship with Dell Worldwide, and it's actually been phenomenal. I think from all of the goals that we had from the relationship, we've hit them all and we're accelerating that business. Great engagement here with a lot of customers, had a great opportunity to talk with a lot of our joint customers, and engage with a lot of the Dell senior sales leadership and the individual sales reps and folks in the field that are part of the team that sells the XC series appliance. And it couldn't have gone better. If we wrote the scripts, we've pretty much hit it. Yeah, so one of the tough things in my job is, Nutanix is a startup in private. Dell's not a startup, well, maybe they are a startup as Michael Dell would say, but they're private now too, so trying to measure whether something successful or not is challenging, but the Dell team shared with me that jointly you guys have hundreds of customers, thousands of nodes, and what really impressed me is the global reach, which I think helps accelerate Nutanix growth. So maybe can you comment a little bit of color on that? Yeah, absolutely. I can't give too much detail on specifics, but yeah, we do have a very large number of customers. One of the things that was particularly interesting in the business that we've done with Dell is a lot of new customers, both for Nutanix and Dell. So the relationship as we structured it, and the reason why we entered into the relationship was Dell really gave us the opportunity to tap into and reach out to customers that with our own sales organization we didn't have the ability to get to yet as a growing company, and so the majority, the vast majority of the customers that we had are actually new customers to Nutanix, and that really speaks to how good we worked together to open those new accounts. Yeah, it's interesting. When we look at, one of the things you get with the Dell relationship is the reach, the channel, and everything goes on. I always look at a deal and say, okay, is this going to amplify the strengths of the company's app, or is it going to bring in new markets? When I look at Nutanix, I said early on, good strength in the federal division, and VDI as use cases, and I've heard a lot of successes on that, so maybe can we talk first about that and then maybe some other use case you've seen? So I think the FBI was a big one. Maybe you can just share with our users. Yeah, there's been, so we did a press release that folks can access and look up all the details, but a $28 million deal for Dell with the FBI, a massive VDI opportunity, where they're essentially switching over to XE hardware and Nutanix web scale software for all of the VDI users at the FBI, and that also, with that team, we're also leveraging that to other federal agencies. But what a lot of customers look at, particularly for VDI, when they're trying to make a decision about a VDI purchase, they want to know what your bigger and larger VDI deployments are. They want to make sure you can scale, because one of the key issues with VDI, as I'm sure you know, is a lot of the traditional infrastructure doesn't scale well. You can start off into a pilot with a hundred or so, and it looks good, but when you really start to scale it breaks down. And so that's one of the key differentiators from Nutanix and the Dell XE series that the FBI used to determine what they were going to do is really there was nothing else that they looked at that could scale and support their needs like the XE series. Now, we have been very successful in the VDI space, but it is only one of many different workloads that the XE series and Nutanix really excels at. I think it's good for us to be known and have a reputation for being really good at VDI, but I think what we're seeing now is we have the same ability to kind of change the game in server virtualization and big data and private cloud and running many other applications, even kind of tier one workloads. So we do have a long string of customer successes with Dell in that area as well. Yeah, it's been interesting to watch, absolutely. You guys started with your name in VDI, but I think the number I shared is, sure you still do plenty of VDI, but a majority of deployments are doing, if they are doing VDI, they're doing other stuff and plenty that are not buying you for VDI, just doing other things. Any specific examples with Dell that you can share or anecdotes even, maybe without a customer name as to good use cases? What we, yeah, so we have a very large retail customer that we've been working with and one of the things that we see is they'll often start out with VDI, so they'll have a VDI need and one of the things about VDI is typically they're deploying computing storage at the same time, which really makes it easier for an XE and Nutanix deployment there. But once they understand how the architecture works and how we scale, it tends to be very viral inside that organization. So what we find is we get a VDI deployment and then they'll have other workloads that come up and they need infrastructure for and rather than go out and redeploy three tier architecture or kind of the old approach to data center infrastructure, they'll bring those workloads into the XE cluster and just expand the XE cluster because it's very easy to pay as you grow and expand that cluster. So it starts to absorb other workloads and other projects that customers have because it is so simple to use. Yeah, one of the things we've looked at at Wikibon is if you look at just the total cost of what we spend on storage, at least 30% on that is what we call the general migration cost. So how long between when I buy it and when it stood up because I got to get stuff onto it and I got to move it and stand it up and then upgrading it and then eventually taking it off versus really more of a pool architecture when you get with a hyper convergent. I gave a talk, actually said it's, we're getting off of the hamster wheel and sitting in the infinity pool instead. We just had closed a deal with a very large financial customer and on the deployment I read the feedback from the customer who sent an email to our sales executives and said this is, doing this deployment took two days and a lot of that time was just people moving around and not actually deploying the hardware in our previous infrastructure. It took them six months to deploy the same thing and that's the kind of, we talk about simplicity and the challenge is there's a lot of organizations out there that want to talk about simplicity, that want to talk about how easy it is to deploy but in a lot of cases what they're going to do is they're going to sell you a lot of PS so that they got to feed their PS folks and sell you a lot of services to get that to work. That's what hyperconvergence really brings to the table. It's not a converged infrastructure in that we can make a bunch of disparate pieces work together. We have one truly converged solution and all the intelligences in the software is a very, very smart software that takes all that work away from, you know, you don't need to have a PhD in how to provision storage to be able to make it work. Yeah, actually I've been watching this space for a long time and we do a lot of education on the market and talk to all the users and the term that's come up over the last year that I hear is so much of IT today is friction and what we need to be able to create is frictionless solutions. So all of those areas that are going to stop me, slow me down and make it more difficult to do my job and deliver for what the business needs. As you said, right, you know, I bring in two days from when it's in and up and everything is so much better than what I had and how many people I have to get involved or so much less, you know, and I walk through with your team as to, you know, adding a node, it was like, no, walk with your, okay, you plug in the power, you plug in the network, you turn everything on and you are done. I mean, no, no, no, what about this? No, no, it's do it, it's done, it just, it's easy to approach. Yeah, it's all the intelligences in the software. So Nutanix really, we talk about invisible infrastructure and I know that sounds like a very, you know, it's a very, sometimes can seem like a very soft marketing-y term but what it really means, and Michael talked about it in his keynote yesterday, is that customers shouldn't have to specialize in all the nuts and bolts of how to put together a data center. They shouldn't have to have a large portion of their staffs dedicated to just making data center infrastructure work. That piece should be invisible to them, it should just work and Nutanix really brings that to the table, not only with the hardware appliance but also in our Acropolis hypervisor. So, you know, Nutanix announced just a few months ago the Acropolis hypervisor that actually takes it up a level with that data center infrastructure that you can deploy on a Nutanix product and really removes the hypervisor complexity from a customer's worries and a lot of that, you know, big piece of that is them paying a tax to a hypervisor vendor on a regular basis where they just, it's just an expense that they have to make and we can take that off the table for them. All right, so Bobby, you gave me a good transition point into the elephant in the room here. So, we could go, Dell made a definitive agreement to acquire EMC. EMC is owner of VMware, which competes with Acropolis. Sure. You know, Dell's going to have this whole big storage portfolio and, you know, relationships become, I guess it's a little bit, it's complicated. So, what does the Dell EMC deal mean to, you know, Nutanix and the Nutanix Dell relationship? Well, you know, Dell has a real strong history in being able to balance different products that maybe overlap in different areas and give customers the ability to evaluate those different products and make the choice for what's best for them. I really don't think, you know, that this has been, there's been a lot of chatter about this. I think it's died down because they're in reality, in my mind at least, the scenarios in which Dell and Nutanix aren't partners because of this reason, you know, a year from now are very kind of far-fetched scenarios in my mind. There's every reason that EMC, the combined EMC Dell company is still going to want to be offering the XC series appliance to their customers. I myself have worked at EMC in the past. At that time, we as EMC owned VMware and VMware still operated as very much an independent company as it does today. And VMware has a lot of partnerships that I'm sure Dell doesn't want to disrupt by being too prescriptive about how they integrate them. Yeah, so I guess my commentary on it, Bob, is nobody in the industry wants to make it difficult for customers or to turn business away. That being said, EMC very much aware what's going on in Hyperconverge, have a number of assets, not just with VMware but the ScaleIO acquisition, and they're doing a lot with that. So I think there's risk over the next year as to where we sit. I say if we look at two years from now, I find it difficult to see as to the mix of what Hyperconverge offers they have Dell and EMC have a real self-interest to push certain things. That being said, they're working a lot on the networking side with open operating systems. Nutanix software is adding values and customers are in into it. Dell wants to sell lots of servers. So it'll be interesting to watch it play out. Congratulations on the success going forward. Any final notes you want to have, kind of customer discussion points here? I think we say customers are a little bit more likely. It's like I need to do this this quarter. I need to do it now. I am making strategic decisions. The channel is a little concerned as to what's going on and there's a lot to go down there. But what's your takeaway from kind of the show overall and any Nutanix specific things that we should know about? Well, so I think there is a lot of, I think everyone's still digesting what this merger might mean if it goes through. And as I said, I think we put a lot of, obviously it was something that we put a lot of thought into. But when you look at the scenarios in the future, I really think what Nutanix does is something that EMC can't offer today. Something that Dell can't offer today. It's something VMware can't do successfully today. What they do, they can do it successfully. If you look at how much of their hyper-converged solution actually gets sold, it's a very small number. So as I said, I think the Dell team that at some point, nine months from now or whenever has to sit down to make a decision and say, is this a product that we want to still be able to offer our customers? I think it's absolutely going to be a yes. And we will continue to support customers, realistically, the NX and the XC series live together in harmony. So any customer who's considering XC today will know that Nutanix as a company will continue to support them indefinitely and will do what it takes to make sure that their investments, they can continue to expand it with Nutanix. All right, well Bob, congratulations on the success so far. Look forward to catching up. Thanks, Stu. Nutanix next year, Dell World next year and the proof's in the pudding, as you said. There are a lot of plays still to be made as we look at this, but we'll be back after the keynote here at Dell World 2015. This is theCUBE.