 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Steamy Miami, I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com. Here with SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage from .NEXT, Nutanix's inaugural user conference, talking to the users, talking to the executives, and talking to the partner ecosystem. Real excited to have VJ Tawari, who's the principal group program manager with Microsoft, and Sunil Poti, also joining us back from Nutanix. VJ, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, thank you for having us here. All right, so Microsoft, I mean, we were talking off camera about here, there's been a big change, it's definitely the last few years, and especially the conversation since Asachya Nadella became CEO, Cloud is front and center, virtualizations, very important piece. Tell us first a little bit about your role at Microsoft, and what you do there. Certainly, so as you pointed out, Microsoft certainly partners with a lot of partners in the ecosystem, to help our partners build solutions for customers. So my role in the company is to help our partners build engineered solutions for the private cloud, enabling all the way down from the portal technology, all the way down through storage, and through the hypervisor. So my job is to work with companies like Nutanix, and others to help them build end to end private cloud solutions for customers. Yeah, it was interesting, we were talking to Sunil before about software companies and platforms, and the ecosystem, because no one company really can do it all today, and those that think they can do it all, probably are going to have some tough time competing. Maybe Sunil, maybe start off, why is Microsoft an important partner? Well, we do like Vijay quite a lot, and it starts there by the way, right? Look, I think in general, if you look at our application workloads, because at the end of the day our infrastructure supports application workloads in terms of the efficacy of how they run, and how they are deployed. And over a period of time, most of our workloads are actually powered by Microsoft technology in reality, right? Original VDI workloads, obviously, under the cover of Microsoft technologies, then when we started introducing Hyper-V, there's the supporting exchange, SQL Server, I'm a share appointment, there's a whole bunch of application workloads itself that makes Microsoft a first class citizen from a partnership perspective. And then over the last year, we've had great collaboration, as Vijay mentioned about multiple dimensions that we can get into that essentially fostered a lot of goodwill between the two teams, not just in the product side or the leadership side, but also in the sales and channel side. And that has brought us even more closer to be a lot more confident and trusting of a long-term relationship that we are on on this journey of invisible infrastructure. And I think to add to what Sunil said, I think it all starts with sort of, what do customers want? And I think one of the great things about something like Nutanix is that they really focus on solving a customer problem, and then going from there. I think that's a vision that both Nutanix and Microsoft share. And so our collaboration actually started from the perspective of solving a real customer problem. And as Sunil mentioned, a whole bunch of workloads that are drawn actually on Nutanix and Microsoft workloads. And so we've been hearing a lot about Nutanix from our customers as well. And so that's obviously led to a great partnership in the offing between Nutanix and Microsoft. All right, so Vijay, I think there's some people that are going to see the Acropolis announcement and be surprised to see Microsoft partnering there. I mean, you guys have your own hypervisor. And even when they talk about things like KVM is, well, Microsoft apps are hugely important. So, is it just more apps and you want to live everywhere, but you really want Hyper-V? What's the positioning? Well, so the multiple things, right? So first and foremost, Nutanix at its core is a multi-hypervisor company, right? They support multiple hypervisors including Hyper-V and we are very encouraged by that. We have a great storage platform today, enhancing up into the management plane. And we certainly want to participate with that in our hypervisor platform as well as the work that they're doing to help customers get to Azure. In addition, our customers demand that you get the best opportunity to run on the best platform. And we want to participate in that opportunity with them. I think just to add a little bit on that, I think when we look at Acropolis being the first order bit of it being around freeing applications to actually be mobile across runtimes as we've talked about. And in the last year, year and a half, Microsoft has proven that they're great at embracing and embodying disruptive technologies by pushing Azure front-end center, by pushing offices if I, right? And I think we ourselves in Nutanix are very emboldened by the fact that Microsoft, it's a new Microsoft. In terms of look, I'm willing to disrupt myself a little bit for the greater good of the customer ecosystem as well as, so I think in terms of Azure for the private cloud, how it works seamlessly with the public cloud and so forth, Nutanix can become a great potential partner that will help free apps so they're not locked into a particular hypervisor. It doesn't matter what it is. They can run on Hyper-V, they can run on the Acropolis hypervisor, or they can run on Azure seamlessly, right? So it behooves us as a partnership to now prove to our customer why the target destination where Hyper-V and Azure become preferred vehicles and that's what we intend to do. Yeah, so I wonder if we could dig into some of the engineering that might need to be done between the companies. I think about multi-cloud, on-prem, off-prem, identity is hugely important and Active Directory really sets the bar for the industry and then from a management standpoint, you now have XCP and you guys have SCVMM. So how do those fit together? What do you work together? What are the swim lanes? Maybe we just start, yeah. So let's start with concrete things that we have done in the past and let the story emerge from there. So first and foremost, about a year back, Nutanix and Microsoft partnered in what is called as a private cloud fast-track program and there, effectively, what was done was that Nutanix, based on a reference architecture, actually submitted a fast-track solution which integrates the Nutanix distributed storage platform with Hyper-V and System Center and with Windows Azure Pack. So that really starts to enable customers to get Azure-like capabilities on-premises by integrating strongly with the Nutanix stack. And then moving forward, we're looking at a couple of different opportunities to continue the partnership part. Certainly as a part of the platform, that the community edition that Nutanix announced, we're looking at sort of enabling customers to be able to do more with the community edition. And then you'll see us make a few more announcements in the future about additional solutions that we're going to partner with Nutanix and bring to fruition in the market. Yeah, PJ, I have to tell you, I've been kind of a little shocked and impressed at how much open-source collaboration and participation that Microsoft is having. This is not the Microsoft that I grew up in IT with. Well, as Satya said it best, we love Linux and by analogy, we have no open-source as accepted in Microsoft as any other form of software in the company today. So from our perspective, if it helps solve the customer need, it doesn't matter where the source is from. Yeah, so, Cineal, there's so many touchpoints inside Microsoft. Is the application the most part? Is it the hypervisor and cloud options? What are your customers having to work with? Yeah, I think to some extent, to PJ's point, it all starts obviously with the customer need around the application workloads. I mean, nobody's just going to come to us and say, look, we need a KVM hypervisor. That's not going to happen. I think that the part is going to be around, look, we need these workloads. How many of them are powered by Microsoft technologies? We believe a majority are. And to the extent that we can work together to provide the best experience, both from a deployment and operations perspective, the underlying runtime becomes almost secondary. And to the extent that we can actually tightly integrate Hyper-V as a first-class citizen which we fully intend to do, extend that seamlessly into Azure, and then expose that as the best runtime for Microsoft workloads, then I think we have a great partnership ahead. PJ, speaking of kind of the containerization, give us the update. Where are we with containerization from Microsoft? And probably a little bit further out, but how does that fit into the whole story of the test? So a couple of different vectors and containers. We first announced a great partnership with Docker. Azure actually runs a whole bunch of container technology there. You can run CoreOS inside Microsoft Azure and it can spin up containers. In fact, this morning, the demo that you saw in the keynote where Bini from Dynamics actually spun up a whole bunch of containers, a large number of them actually ended up were running on Azure. That's one part of it. Then Microsoft itself has announced native Windows containers. We actually announced two types of containers. One is called Windows Server containers and the other is called Hyper-V containers. With Hyper-V containers, you get a lot more isolation and security isolated boundaries. And then with Windows, you get less isolation, but you get large scale from a containerization standpoint. And all of this at the front end will integrate with Docker. So we got a very powerful story that emerges for customers who want to be able to use containers, regardless of whether they happen to be Linux containers or whether they happen to be Windows containers. And I think that's another place where the integration with XEP will be important. Today they demonstrated the ability for you to spin up containers right from inside Prism. And that by extension, by virtue of the integration that we have, that will extend to also be able to build off of Windows containers when they're available in the next release of server. Sanil? Yeah. He said it all. He said it all. Absolutely great. Containerization is done. Yeah, give us a little bit insight. How long is this partnership? You know, what regularly calls? Are you guys meeting at the customer for some of these? You know, share a little bit more about how the company's working. I understand. As I mentioned a little bit, you know, we organically raised the bar from a need of making Microsoft a strategic partner, even before we had a formal relationship, because most of the workloads that we targeted were Microsoft applications. Then as we started internalizing Hyper-Wee as a platform among our portfolio, then we started the joint discussions. And, you know, Vijay mentioned about the series of things that we had done in terms of FastTrack, AzurePack. In fact, we're increasingly seeing not just Microsoft workload deployments, whether it pulls in Hyper-Wee or just natively Hyper-Wee deployments. As I mentioned, you know, we're seeing about a 70% growth in our Hyper-Wee as a hypervisor market from our quarter over quarter numbers. It's pretty significant. But we're also now seeing many of our customers, actually in fact, some of the customers that are on our stage and so forth, they're also adopting AzurePack or maybe Azure in some shape or shot. So I think that we are at the cusp of, I think, the new Microsoft really emerging beyond just the public cloud where they've made a significant impact into the private enterprise and doing it in a way where you can truly own enterprise workloads both in and out. And I think that's why I think there's a mutually beneficial partnership long term. Yeah, and I think, you know, nothing behooves a strong partnership other than deep engineering relationships and you're sort of in the past to actually continue the deep partnership at the engineering level and then good things emerge out of that for customers. Yeah, so I was going through my notes on all the announcements and they're one that seems like a perfect proof point of this. The iSCSI MPIO exchange support. I tell you, we've had, for years, we've been having the discussion on, you know, should exchange only be Das? Really, I fought with Microsoft for years on that. No, of course it's a Hyper-Wee, you can virtualize it, but everything else. So, yeah, I mean, where are we exchanged in this solution? No, but I'm a little bit Simon. Basically, it took us a while to get here because, you know, we actually started our company was originally iSCSI based. Didn't work for some workloads, we switched over to NFS and then, you know, we have iSCSI, for say the, you know, the KVM portion. But one of the things that we realized was most of the Acropolis workloads as an Acropolis as the platform workloads for Microsoft apps. You know, feedback was around native MPIO support for iSCSI and, you know, eventually, you know, we just adopted it as a first class implementation. It's taken a while for us to implement it because that actually exposes our NDFS file system now. It's no longer just a file system because now we have lots of interface, right? So that's one of the reasons why we are also calling it a distributed storage fabric. And we already have great success in exchange diplomas as an example. I did give an example of, you know, yeah, we can do 10,000, you know, greater than 10,000 mailboxes in a four-year form factor. I mean, that normally would take about a rack or so in the normal world, right? So, you know, we're looking forward to great, great uptake of the iSCSI for exchange over the next six months. And, you know, in addition to that, you know, they also talked about sort of the SMB-based filer this morning. Yeah. You know, that's the implementation of the SMB protocol. Again, you know, kind of the great work that, you know, we both done said, look, customers are asking for a file-based mechanism for a filer. They've got a great underlying substrate for storage, layer, you know, scale our file server on top with the SMB head, and that provides a lot of value to customers. So all over, you know, right from the underlying storage fabric, right through the virtualization layer, all the way up onto the cloud layer and the management layer, we've got multiple touch points of integration that we are seeing between Nutanix and us. All right, so, Fiji, you know, let's talk a little bit about just, you know, the ecosystem in general. You know, we talked on the last segment with Sunil about, you know, there was kind of VMware built out of big ecosystem. You know, what's your thoughts on Nutanix's ecosystem and Microsoft's and, you know, how do they overlap and cross-pollinate? So I think, you know, first of all, you know, it's been great to see sort of this conference and the number of partners that are out here. You know, I was just walking around sort of the expo center and the number of partners who are here, you know, demonstrating a genuine interest in participating with Nutanix, as well as customers who are actually bringing core problems and, you know, I see a lot of discussion on the whiteboard about all the kinds of interesting things that they're happening. You know, Microsoft has always focused on building out a partner of ecosystem of partners to help customers achieve what they're really trying to achieve. In the converging space, you know, we, like you pointed out, it's certainly not the case that one partner is going to be able to do it all, but we certainly see that the dramatic simplification that convergence brings to customers, whether they happen to be storage and compute, in the case of Nutanix, or we are seeing other innovative architectures which actually converge the entire solution all the way down from networking. We have our own solution called the Microsoft Cloud Platform System, which does the same thing as well. The goal is to basically make the life of customers easy inside the data center. And to achieve that, you have to bring in the right set of partners which can, which provide the integration and is not done at the backs of the customer, rather it's done with pre-engineered solutions that we give out to the customers. And our partnership with Nutanix and other partners, and that's the ecosystem that we're trying to foster now so that customers are not having to deal with the complexity in the data center. Well, I think to some extent, as part of the evolution of Microsoft into the hybrid cloud environment, leveraging Azure public cloud as a key linchpin, I think the ability to create the new design point becomes very important, right? So CPS as the logical construct manifested as maybe a runtime version implemented by Nutanix or other implementations. I think it will be the way to foster Azure PAC or next generation CPS like technologies so that that's really how we see the acceleration of the private cloud happening while being open to a public cloud construct. All right, so, Sunil, I got a question from the audience that says, how many iPhones have you lost in the last 24 months? Ha ha ha ha, actually last 24 months, I lost one. I said, I didn't lose one, I broke one. But before that, just as a setup question was, I used to have a high frequency of iPhone losses, right, in the first year of the iPhone. I think my team took most of them, right, by the way. I still haven't found many of them, but anyway, it's really useful. One way to incentivize your team, I guess. No, no, if only I could get some Windows phones, man. Maybe I could. Well, if you had asked me the question, I would have said none because I have only a Windows phone. Yes, it sounds like there's an opportunity. All right, B.J., I want to give you kind of the closing remarks on this. We look at this space, kind of the hyperconvergence but just, where do we expect to see Microsoft more? Because to be honest, they were a little quiet. Azure's been real busy, Hyper-V's been busy, but maybe touch on hyperconvergence, things like OpenStack. Should we expect to see more visible Microsoft? Is it a partnering activity? I know you're at the Nutanix show, but show us a little bit as to what to expect from Microsoft this year. Sure, so before I go anywhere, first of all, I'd like to congratulate Nutanix on a fantastic event, right? You know, Kostla said it really well, 1,000 people on the first user conference that's a great achievement by Nutanix. Microsoft, you know, we announced at Ignite, a new version of our stack called the Microsoft Azure Stack which literally brings the Azure technologies on-premise. It basically builds the compute, resources, the network and providers. So you basically have the ability to sort of at runtime decide where you want your application to be deployed, whether it happens to be deployed on-premise or in the public cloud. That's a great advancement that we're bringing forth for customers, so they actually don't have to make a decision about where that application is built or deployed at design time. Rather it's done actually at the deployment time. In the context of OpenStack, you know, we are participants in the OpenStack community, you know, Windows Server, you know, we participate in the OpenStack and Windows Server we support as a part of OpenStack distributions. And so we certainly, you know, looking forward to continue our participation with the OpenStack community as well. But certainly, you know, our preference is not to get beholden to sort of all these things are a means to an end. I think that was highlighted this morning at the keynote as well. And what you really focused on is enabling customers to achieve their goals, both in terms of the economics and in terms of the challenges that they're facing today in the data center. And that's what we are really hoping to focus and bringing as solutions to partners, with partners to customers. All right, so Vijay, thank you so much for joining. Sunil, thank you for coming back. I think Sunil has called it the A-Block, which, you know, Azure is definitely a part of. Look forward to watching, you know, all of what's going on in Microsoft and this growing partnership. We'll be right back with lots more here from Nutanix's inaugural dot com conference. Thanks for watching and stay tuned for lots more.